An Indecisive Indian

One day circa mid November 2017, before our meeting with the car body consultants, I found Sri Srinivas, the CDE/M sitting in his room with shoulders drooping, looking visibly flustered. Generally given to enquire after people’s personal state of affairs and health, I checked with him. He said that the number of iterations in the designs, whether with the consultants or vendors, was proving to be a nightmare. He added that our designers and drafters had to rework on the detailed drawings repeatedly. In addition, there were some components which were imported and required changes after validation and analysis either at vendors’ place or at ICF. He was worried that this was the status even before the actual manufacture of Train 18 platform had started at ICF and he wondered aloud if the same cycle of work would repeat once a prototype was applied on the platform at ICF. I told him not to forget that his men were breaking new ground and that this was a learning process which would hold t...

  The design organization is the heart of a coach factory, or indeed any major manufacturing unit, which offers complete solution from concept to manufacture. This was the bulwark on which our success would be built so it needed some resurgence. The design organization of ICF was renamed as the ICF Designs Centre (DC), replacing the old hackneyed nomenclature, Design and Development Wing . Headed by Sri Srinivas , Chief Design Engineer/Mech. and Sri Vavre , Chief Design Engineer/Elect., this centre was rearing to do something big. Not only were both these officers one of the best on IR with a positive disposition geared towards design development of new products, they had nurtured a team capable of helping them do it. In the last two years, we also invested in improving the façade of the building and provided ergonomically-designed work places with top of the line work stations.  Incidentally, the place of Sri Vavre was later taken over by Sri D.P. Dash ,  ano...

The Train 18 project was making a good progress in the latter part of 2017. At the same time, many changes were sweeping ICF. It would be in fitness of things if I look back at these cultural revisions which benefitted ICF directly, not collaterally, in its all-round efforts towards enhanced production, development of new variants, carbon neutrality, empowerment of women, waste management, revival of greenery, sporting accomplishments and of course, Train 18 and other new innovative and modernistic products and projects. Love your organization . That’s my simple mantra before you begin anything in any organization. If you do not, or if you are unable to, quit, unless of course, it’s a bread and butter issue. If you do not, you are doing a great disservice to the organization you work for and, more than that, to yourself. It is of course a bit difficult if your job is to sell the unspeakable, but then, it can be and must be done. But if you work for Indian Railways, you are in all...

What about the procurement actions as such? We, like other government organizations, had to follow the Public Procurement Policy provisions and guidelines. There are a lot of misconceptions about these policies; the prime misgiving among purchasers and suppliers being the intent and execution. Most people seem to believe that the policy prevents you from buying the best and L1 syndrome guides you to go to the lowest bidder with quality and durability of the product given a short shrift. This is far from the reality. The policy guides you to make sure that public funds are used judiciously and that some form of level playing field is available to aspiring suppliers vis-à-vis the established ones. As a government executive dealing with public money, one must have the courage of conviction to decide which product(s) would be the best for an application and then go about ensuring that with a cogent argument. The policy does not prevent you from doing it. I would go so far as to say that...

I quoted in the last post, “ The fool doth think he is wise , but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” . Well, t he self-styled fools of the ICF’s Design team, shedding their pretension of being wise, were at work. Day and night. Bereft of the technical pearls flowing daily on their Whatsapp groups, my job was to meddle ever so little but meddle I must.   The beauty of working with these European consultants was that they had mostly seen better and without saying so, they did give a sense that we could only improve from where we were. Consultants are not a member of a big multi-national and their stake in our delivery on design and build is much higher than the latter. To begin with, they are not arrogant. They seek to first determine our capability and mould their concepts and designs accordingly. The consultants were clearly much more open in looking at all feasible sourcing, including development, in India than a multi-national providing us with ToT ever would be. The in...