Not a minute late or not a minute early but the exact time

Padma Shri E Sreedharan, India’s metro man, retired on 31st Dec 2011.  He started his career in 1954 as a Probationary Assistant Manager and served Delhi Metro for 16 years. He redefined Transportation in India as a social service rather than a business and was known for his concern for the environment. His project emphasized minimizing inconvenience to people. He has set a bench mark in Project Management starting from Leadership, Risk Management to Cost Estimation and Budgeting in DMRC which runs 210 trains.  From the start of the construction in 1 Oct 1998, every phase of Delhi Metro was completed on time.  First phase, which was completed in 2006 was three years earlier to its scheduled time. The Phase II also managed to finish by the time of 2010 and Phase III & IV are scheduled to be completed by 2020. Not just for his focus on the Project, he is also known for his organizational culture where he was totally committed to Corporate Mission with efficiency, transparency and courtesy.


The key to his success was his adherence to his words “Punctuality means not a minute late or not a minute early but the exact time”. He made Delhi Metro so much prompt that trains with frequency less than 3 minutes, if late more than 60 seconds, where considered to be delayed whereas in the best of metros in the world the margin was three minutes with even lesser frequency. He believes that punctuality is nothing but a courtesy to others and other two major things each individual working in a project needs to possess are professional competence and a physical and mental strength to boost self-confidence. So he never compromised on choosing the right person for the right job, which created an amiable and conducive working environment. While execution of the Project, he always motivated and inspired the employees with rewards for their work. He is also one with excellent Negotiation skills and Conflict Management skills.  DMRC had to work along with DTC for widening of Road and Electricity Board of Delhi for the electrification and it being an enormous task had to have a good Cost Estimation and Budgeting. DMRC consulted with the best in the business like Hong Kong MTR for operation and construction techniques. Sreedharan set an example for Indian Business by never letting the collaboration to be a problem or a cause for delay in the Project.

Before joining Delhi Metro he was a chief engineer in Indian Railway. He was the first Indian to introduce Build Operate and Transfer (BOT) and he undertook a stretch of 760 km with 93 tunnels and over 150 bridges. To add to his credits, he was in charge of implementation, planning and design of Calcutta Metro which before his joining was underperforming company with delayed projects.  He never changed any decisions of his simply because somebody wanted. His ideology is to fight all the odds and work on the project, once the project is completed, every one including those who opposed will appreciate. He is considered to be the best in the country in Project Management enterprise with concern for environment, employment and customers.

Deepak Sirra, a PGP Student of IIM Raipur, has worked in a Construction SME for 2 years. He can be reached at pgp11011.deepak@iimraipur.ac.in.

IIM Raipur Students Interact with Core Industries at National Expo - 3

The students of Indian Institute of Management Raipur had interactions aimed at knowledge-exchange with the entrepreneurs and representatives of the micro, small scale and medium scale enterprises (MSMEs) who participated in the National Expo 3. The expo was organized at Science College Ground in Raipur under the banner of Indore Infoline Pvt. Ltd. from 16^th December to 18^th December, 2011.

National Expo 3 is the largest industry exhibition in central India. Almost 200 companies from core sectors like steel, power, cement, mining, infrastructure, construction and automation participated in the event. The list includes Siemens Ltd., Wendt (India) Ltd., Doshion Ltd., Atlas Copco India Ltd. and many small scale and medium scale enterprises. Moreover, some foreign companies, mainly from China and Singapore, were also present. This exhibition provided them an opportunity to display their products and technology and to interact with potential customers. It also proved to be a very useful platform for some budding companies and new products as they got significant exposure.

The students of IIM Raipur took up this opportunity and attended the National Expo 3 with the sole intention of learning through interactions with the local industries. Chhattisgarh is well known for its Core Industries and we experienced it first-hand while talking to the representatives of the various start-ups who also were participating. Many of the students have some prior experience in the core sectors like steel, power, mining, construction etc. This further added to the quality and fruitfulness of the interactions as they could easily connect with the industry representatives and understand their problems and practices. We learnt about their technology, logistics, markets, competition and management practices. They also shared with us the problems that they confront while setting up or expanding business in Chhattisgarh as well as those that come up in day-to-day operations. The discussions then went on towards the possible solutions, where we tried to complement their experience with our classroom learning. Finally, we talked about the likely future scenario of industries in Chhattisgarh, and found that almost everyone seemed quite optimistic. We also explored opportunities for making the Expo a bigger success by researching into dimensions like Logistics, Layout, Customer Satisfaction, Branding etc.

In a nutshell, the National Expo 3 proved to be a great learning experience for IIM Raipur students and we look forward to participate in and contribute to such events in the future.

The writer of this article, Abhay Shankar is a PGP student of Indian Institute of Management, Raipur and has done his B. Tech (Chemical Engineering) from BIT Sindri. Prior to joining IIM Raipur, Abhay was working at Vedanta Aluminium Ltd. Abhay can be reached at pgp11001.abhay@iimraipur.ac.in