Why Dr Sreedharan should not be given the Bharat Ratna
India had just lost the boxing day test match, with a day to spare. Star News was deciding who was the ‘Match Ka Mujrim’. Others were wondering when Sachin will finally score that created in the boardroom, 100th hundred. If an alien visited India around that time and switched on the tele, he/she would have thought our world started and ended with cricket.
Is it simply because, Dr Sreedharan, is not your quintessential Indian Success Story?
One such cyclone, hit the coastal town of Rameshwaram on 22nd of December, 1964. And it was a deadly one.
He was asked to go to Mumbai, to take charge of what was then deemed to be India’s toughest project since independence. It involved burrowing through basalt mountains, spanning kilometer long marshes and rivers and taking railways to a place where even the Britishers thought it was impossible. This region was the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, affectionately called, the Konkan.
The railway babus simply called this herculean venture, Konkan Railway. Naming things is not really their forte.
and this
infested with
and perennially at the risk of
And to do that, Sreedharan had to
2. Build 2000 Bridges, both major and minor, across Marshes, swamps, rivers and backwaters.
3. Blast 92 tunnels, totaling 83 kilometers in length through Basalt, nature’s adamantium and soft soil, nature’s china clay. You need nuclear weapons and Arnold to bore through the former while the latter generally collapsed on itself, if someone as much as farted.
4. Dealing And Negotiating With The Chief Ministers, Home Ministers, Other Ministers And Their Chelas Of Four Different States.
And to complete all of the above tasks, Dr Sreedharan, was given 8 years.
It would be like Hercules being asked to accomplish his twelve tasks, blinded and with one hand tied to his back, in three days.
Needless to say, he would have failed. Dr Sreedharan, supposedly retired and who qualified for Indian Railway’s senior citizen quota, finished the job in 7 years. Konkan Railway to me, is the second biggest achievement of Independent India, with the first being India remaining India. New standards will have to be invented, to realistically measure the impact of Konkan Railway on the Indian economy.
For starters
1. For the first time ever, three largest ports on the Indian coast, Mumbai, Karwar and Mangalore have a direct connection.
2. Travel time from the southern states to the north, have been reduced by upto 40 percent. The crummy old Nethravathi Express, used to take 38 hours to travel from Trivandrum to Mumbai. Now, thanks to Dr E Sreedharan and the
KONKAN RAILWAYthe same train takes 22 Hours. A 16 hour reduction in travel time. And a 16-18 hour reduction in travel times of all trains going from Kerala,Karnataka, Goa to the North.
THIS IS THE VIADUCT OVER THE PANVEL NADI
Which basically is a Marsh
Between two Hills
And to traverse it, the train has to travel at a height, which is as tall as
In other words, Dr Sreedharan and his team, built a goddamn Qutub Minar, over a marsh, between two hills, just so that, a train could chug over it. Need I say more?
You will see this wonder of Modern India immediately after Ratnagiri on the Konkan Railway. In the 15 kilometer stretch between Ratnagiri and Nivasar, there are 3 tunnels and 5 viaducts. The third viaduct is the Panval Nadi viaduct, immediately after the first tunnel. The exact sequence will be —->Big Tunnel, Massive Gorge, Big tunnel again.
There are more people in this pic than there is in all of Canada.
1. It took 22 years to build the Calcutta Metro, A metro whose total length was 16.75 kms. In other words, Calcutta Metro construction dudes managed a grand average of,.76 kms a year.
2. The Calcutta metro suffered from debilitating shortages in almost everything. Shortages of funds, shortages in labour and shortages in everything else. The only they had in plenty were those damn shortages.
3. And it was harried by the parent, the Indian Railways, every step of the way.
If the Calcutta metro was any indicator, the 168 Kms long Delhi Metro would have been beset with shortages, harassed by the Railways and would have been completed in A.D 2083.
But then this was Dr E Sreedharan.
2. After giving himself the power, he changed the tendering process, upside down. In a country, where opening a single tender on an average,took six to nine months, Dr Sreedharan got the job done in 19 days. YES,19 Days.
3. When confronted with the standard Government ‘I am short of money’ rigamarole, Dr Sreedharan did what any sensible government servant should do. He simply cut out the Government from the funding. He single-handedly went and got a loan of USD 5 Billion sanctioned from the Japanese Bank of International Co-operation to fund the Metro. Now, 60 percent of the necessary finance secured, Government shut up and stumped up the remaining cash.
4. He then hired top International consultants from an assortment of countries, to cover for the lack of local talent, to supervise and execute the project.
The successful execution of the Delhi Metro, made Dr Sreedharan the Tom Cruise of the Metro Rail universe. Every Indian city worth its salt, now wanted its own metro and Dr Sreedharan as its consultant.
You know where this is going. In September 2008, Dr Sreedharan, after observing as a consultant, sent the following report to the Planning Commission, Government of India Making available 296 acres of prime land to the BOT [build, operate and transfer] developer for commercial exploitation was like selling the family silver. I fear a big political scandal some time later, as it is apparent the BOT operator has a hidden agenda which appears to be to extend the metro network to a large tract of his private land holdings so as to reap a windfall profit of four to five times the land price.
Next time, any Dilli boy/girl tries to mock you or anyone with the moniker Madrasi, just mention the words, Metro-Sreedharan-Madrasi in the same sentence. The other side will shut up.
1. He restored India’s longest sea bridge which was completely destroyed, in 46 days.2. He designed India’s first Metro.3. Supervised the building of India’s first indigenous Merchant vessel.4. Executed India’s most difficult project since Independence.5. Gave Delhi wallahs, something called the Metro.6. Predicted India’s biggest corporate fraud, three months before it happened.I don’t know how the Bharat Ratna nomination thing works. But I believe you stand a chance if you have done something good for the country. Now tell me, what has Dr Sreedharan not done for the country? I mean when you can consider a guy who sells a computer anti-virus on prime-time television for India’s highest civilian award, Why is there not a whisper about a guy who has ensured 400,000 people on the western coast of India saw a train for the first time? Or, was responsible for a sharp drop in road-rage killings in Delhi? Come to think of it though, I really don’t want Dr Sreedharan to get the Bharat Ratna. I mean, he will then join a club that is populated by people like Bismillah Khan, Lata Mangeshkar, Bhimsen Joshi etc. No disrespect to them, but they were at best, paid performers who had negligible impact on the population of India.(Lata Mangeshkar in fact has had a negative impact. A flyover which will bring respite to thousands, if not lakhs, of Mumbaikars is not being constructed solely due to her ‘privacy’ concerns)
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