After reading your reply, I can guess that you're trying to propose condition of Mr Prabhu as our ex-PM who might have had his hands tight in some way and didnot have any control despite being the supreme leader.
And do you really think that any kind of effective marketing would have got flexi fare some success? The biggest asset for people today is "TIME". I can still expect success of bullet trains despite high prices because of less travel time and effective marketing can help easily in that. But for flexifare system for the trains that have longer journey time, the outcomes of this was very obvios. The posts of IR on social media showing their firmness and belief of being...
more... able to retain their passengers was just an over-confidence.
Mr. Prabhu might be unlucky to be made the captain of a sinking ship but then to endure and bear the things that will just 'accelerate' the sinking, is in a way his fault as well. The pathbreaking reforms that was expected from Mr Prabhu under leadership of Mr Modi didnot just involve showy things like declaration of world class station complexes and remote area connectivity but also essential reforms in the internal structure.
There is still time left in his current tenure. And there is no crisis of good policymakers and decision takers in the country. The internal personnel reform is highly required from Apex level to lowest levels just in the lines of how Mr PM shuffles his cabinet. Nor, no matter how good Mr Prabhu's intentions are and how much his commintment is, to change the Railways, all we will get is a time being media publicity of some good "initiative" while the main framework of the "ship" keeps on getting weaker making it more vulnerable to sink in coming time.