Reforms in land management in Indian railways

Abstract

Indian railways are the nerves of the nation. Over 150 years, Indian Railways have consistently contributed towards the transportation sector and influenced the betterment of the countryside. This organization needs to update itself in all its activities and resource mobilization. There is tremendous need of funds for betterment of Indian Railways in these days despite being constrained to take on the cheap airlines and expressways and to carry bulk goods for long distance charging reasonably low. Land management in Indian Railways is picking up great importance in capital and revenue generation and as an instrument Railway Land Development Authority has been formed. This is my humble attempt to study the land management in Indian Railways which includes conventional means and recent paradigm shift. Based on the extant policies of the Ministry, some schemes are since being practiced. Some new ventures have been successfully completed. All these schemes are very thought-provoking because its study reveals such a conflict of interests that this complex study becomes educative and interesting. This also gives very good feedback on how best railway lands can be exploited. Recent means of land management in Indian Railways include schemes like co-operative society based shopping complexes, upfront payment model and commercial / residential special purpose vehicles of Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. Let us attempt to know about the organization structure of Indian Railways, its documentation style and methods adopted for land valuation. There appears to be tremendous potential in this subject. This study explains all these entities in context of land market and economics. My research is exploratory and I have collected both primary and secondary data. Primary data is gathered by unstructured interviews of officials and structured responses while secondary data is collected from Railway Board, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation and Railway Land Development Authority. As we get more involved in this study, we come across a situation wherein administration would need to take multi-criteria, multi-alternative decision to optimize the goal. The subjectivity in land management and multiple criteria and multiple alternatives made me think of introducing Operations Research techniques in decision making process. I have recommended use of a model that works on principles of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) as a solution; which I have explained by a mock drill on a real case study. The inputs of the AHP model are the outputs of responses processed by Delphi technique. In this process, there is scope to arrive at reasonable level of consensus; iteration by iteration and the data can be analyzed statistically. This has been done to justify each and every modality of the model. In fact the mock drill validates the model in real life situation. Conventionally, Indian railways kept the land management in a dormant condition and the main purpose was to hold the possession of land and utilise it in a more social manner. The practise of documentation and land valuation needs lot of professionalism. I feel this research would enable the reader to visualize most of the modalities and intricacies in land management in Indian Railways and I hope that my model will be of some interest to the decision makers.