Delhi Metro's E. Sreedharan: Using some simple, but effective project management rules, he has kept the metro on the fast track

It's forty minutes past nine on a Wednesday morning, and Elattuvalapil Sreedharan is at Delhi Metro's Shahdara station. Milling around him are the corporation's 15-odd senior executives, wearing the regulation brown trousers, cream-coloured tees and safety helmets. It's a big day. There's just 39 days to go before Delhi Metro's internal target of full service from Shahadra to Tis Hazari is to be hit. And today, Sreedharan and his executives will take a ride on the Rotem-Mitsubishi built electric train-its first trial run on self-power.

But that's not the only reason why the DMRC honchos are holding their breath. Sreedharan is visiting the station, which is still buzzing with construction activity, after almost three months and they know there will be plenty of questions from him. And there is. "Why aren't the escalators working?" shoots off the 71-year-old Managing Director, as he takes the stairs to the platform on the upper level. Somebody tells him the target date is November 31. On the platform, the 88-tonne train (with four coaches) is already idling, but Sreedharan is in no hurry to board it. Instead, he wants to know why the thin strips of tiles that will indicate the "do-not-cross" point for commuters are not in place. Looking up, he inspects overhead lightings and immediately finds something amiss. "Ashish, your lights are not aligned," the civil engineer in him points out. He is assured that it will be set right.

It's time to board the train, but there's another issue that has caught his eye. "Is the gap between the train and the platform uniform down the line?" he asks. Somebody pulls out a sheaf of papers that shows the measurements at various stations along the route. He takes a close look at the numbers, questions some figures, but is convinced by the answers. The rare displeasure is made known not by raising of voice or snapping, but by a stern looking away. Over the next two hours and 40 minutes, Sreedharan will get off at all the four stops to ISBT on this truncated trial run, jot down points on his pocket-sized executive note pad and, in effect, take stock of his biggest-and possibly the last-project.

Back at Shahdara, I ask Sreedharan if he is confident DMRC will meet its December 25 flag off target for the first section of line one. "Oh, absolutely," he says, sipping a cup of tea that has been served in refreshments. If few doubt his claim, it's because he comes to DMRC with a huge reputation. As the Chairman and Manging Director of Konkan Railway between 1990 and 1997, he was responsible for pulling off what is widely believed to be the most difficult railway engineering work in this part of the world: laying 760 kms of track along the treacherous coastline to connect Mumbai with Mangalore, via 2,000 bridges and 92 tunnels.

By the way, he was 58 and retired when the then Union railway minister George Fernandes dared him to complete a project that had been hanging fire for more than a hundred years. Of course, he did-but there's some regret. "Litigations in Goa held up work for a year, and some tunnels proved tougher than we expected," says Sreedharan. That delayed the project by two years, but didn't stop the government from awarding him the Padma Shree last year for nation-building.

Even by the Konkan Railway standards, Delhi's first mass transport system is a tall order. For a number of reasons. To begin with, Sreedharan has to complete Phase I of the project in five years instead of the original seven. The first phase involves laying 62 kms of track through some of the most congested areas in the capital. Land has to be acquired, settlements removed, and construction has to happen with the least inconvenience to a city that boasts of more vehicles than Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad combined. (Did you know that 3,000-odd DMRC trucks ply every night between 10 pm and 6 am to transport the 60 lakh cubic metres of earth moved so far? And if there's no soil on the roads to show for it, it's because the trucks are covered with damp tarpaulin and spillages are cleaned by tractors equipped with scrubbers.)

In terms of technology, the Delhi metro is a generation ahead of its only peer-Kolkata metro. For instance, its coaches are made of lightweight stainless steel, have a microprocessor-controlled Train Integrated Management System, which-like in the case of modern passenger cars-monitors the health of critical sub-systems of the train continuously. Then, the cost of the project-Phase-I carries a tag of Rs 10,570 crore-is unlike anything Sreedharan has handled before. He admits as much. "No doubt Konkan was a difficult project, but Delhi metro is on a totally different scale."

Life Begins At 60

After Konkan was completed, Sreedharan wanted to hang up his boots and return to Palghat, where he was born. But Delhi's then Chief Secretary P.V. Jaikrishnan, who was earlier the Chief Secretary in Goa, persuaded him to take up one last assignment. Although he was pushing 65, Sreedharan was in great shape, thanks largely to his daily regimen of meditation and yoga. He agreed, but, like in Konkan, laid down his terms of engagement. He would be given a carte blanche, he'd get to pick each and every member of his team, and there would be no political interference. The principal promoters, including the Delhi and Union governments, and the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), agreed.

In November 1997, Sreedharan went to work in a 15x8 office in Delhi's Lodhi Road and thus kick-started a project first mooted in 1970. Unlike Konkan, where funds were scraped from different sources and the project survived hand-to-mouth, Delhi metro had its finances tied up, with JBIC alone contributing more than half of it. That allowed him to insist on state-of-the-art rail technology. For instance, instead of emus (like the ones in Mumbai), he asked for modern trains.

With the concept in place, it was then a question of building a small, but highly competent, team. Predictably, he tapped some key engineers from Konkan. To this day, DMRC has just 617 employees on its payroll, and nine out of 10 are engineers. Says A.J. Burchell of Pacific Consultants Company of Japan, general consultants to the project: "I've worked in Cairo, Hong Kong and Singapore setting up metros, and I can tell you this is a world-class team."

Mr Prompt: As a 31-year old railway engineer in South India, Sreedharan rebuilt a bridge washed away by tidal waves, in a record 46 days

The irony is most of them are on deputation from the railways, arguably one of the most bloated and bureaucratic organisations in the country. (Also, don't forget there are 200-odd government projects where some Rs 20,000 crore of public money is stuck.) So what explains the rave reviews? The answer to that lies in something Sreedharan discovered when he moved to Konkan, a project he and Fernandes revived over breakfast at a railway rest house in Lucknow. "As a railway engineer, I had lots of ideas on how to do things better, but the set up did not offer much freedom," says Sreedharan. "Therefore, it was simply a question of finding like-minded people and giving them the freedom to do what they know best about."

That's one reason why DMRC's three lines for Phase I are headed by chief project managers each with complete responsibility for deadlines, quality of work, and even land acquisition. For example, at the Shahdara station, there was a 30-year-old Shiva temple that needed relocation. DMRC not only spent Rs 7 lakh on building a new temple, but also sent its deputy chief engineer to Jaipur to buy additional idols. Says Brajesh Mishra, the man who made the trip: "Our brief is simple: do anything you have to, but get the job done."

That was pretty much the brief at Konkan too. In Goa, for instance, when track alignment seemed impossible within the deadline set by Sreedharan, the then chief engineer B Rajaram, currently Konkan's MD & CEO, decided to send freshly minted diploma engineers on motorbikes modified to carry levelling instruments, to do the survey. Thirty such teams worked on 16 different alignments, and the data was analysed on a software that Rajaram himself had written. Result: the survey cost a tenth of what it should have.

Another time when a monstrous track maintenance machine that Rajaram had requisitioned ended up paralysing nh-17 for two days because of driver error, Sreedharan ordered the machine to be sent back. But Rajaram defied the order, and guiding the transport team over telephone, ensured the trailer's safe arrival. The next day Sreedharan called up-not to yell at Rajaram but for a pat on the back. "That's the thing about him," says Rajaram. "He gives you a lot of freedom and insulates you from consequences if your intentions are genuine."

At DMRC too, Sreedharan has insulated his engineers from all outside interference, and created an organisational culture that's more in sync with the task at hand. There's no open tendering; instead, contractors are pre-qualified and rated on certain efficiency indices. There are no peons, except for directors. Decisions are taken across the table to avoid delays (one day's delay pushes up notional and actual costs by Rs 2.30 crore), and 80 per cent of a contractor's bills is paid within 48 hours of receipt. Every Monday morning there's a weekly review meeting of all the heads of departments, and on the first Monday of every month there's a meeting with the 40-odd deputy chief engineers. Says S.M. Mital, Advisor (Engineering), DMRC, thumbing over his shoulder at the neatly stacked files behind his chair: "Be it office files or project work, at DMRC you are accountable for what you do."

Empowerment, it seems, encourages innovation. The 600-metre metro Yamuna bridge, for instance, was built in a record 28 months using the "incremental launching" technique, where a single bloc of girder is slid along the length of the bridge. The benefits: lower initial and maintenance costs, smoother ride, and quicker completion. Similarly, some of the wells have been sunk in half the normal time using unconventional methods.

But one area where Sreedharan, whose typical day begins at 4:30 am with meditation and pooja and ends at 6:00 pm, has come up against the wall is property development-something that is supposed to fetch 6 per cent of the project cost. Against a target of Rs 500 crore for the project execution period, money raised from property development is a mere Rs 4 crore. The problem: besides the depressed real estate market, Delhi Development Authority (DDA), which for the last three years has been sitting on DMRC's applicatons for change in land use.

That, however, is unlikely to detract much from Sreedharan's achievements. As Delhi gears up for its first ride on the metro, the man himself is getting ready to hang up his boots. His term ended on November 4 this year, but when BT went to press, he had not got a formal extension, although he had been asked to continue until further notice. Phase I doesn't get completed until 2005 and the Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh governments want him to be a consultant to their own metro projects, but Sreedharan is longing to change tracks and pursue things spiritual.

Even if he does call it a day, DMRC by now, many believe, has enough momentum to carry on much the way it does today. "Two big projects post retirement isn't too bad," quips Sreedharan. For somebody who didn't think of a career in railways until well into his second job, not bad at all.