(1) What political mileage is RM getting by pampering UP is any body's guess, it is the ruling party + MoS who are direct beneficiaries, no personal interest of RM is there. In fact he personally must be very frustrated with this, because otherwise good work done by him is being frittered away, through these activities forced on IR.
(2) RM have delegated a lot of things and relying too much on bureaucracy. Flexi etc schemes are more a creation of the bureaucracy under stress to increase revenue, and RM is responsible by way of allowing them to do so. RM is doing his job well by giving right directions to facilitate public and improve IR in long run, but controlling...
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notorious IR bureaucracy & unions may turn out to be his Achilles heel.
(3) More emphasis need to be done in improving through cost control and improving the work practices and organisation structure in order to improve financial condition of IR.
(4) Very high subsidy to any class (non ac general/ passes/ SL) has to be avoided. Review of concessions, free passes, unwanted facilities/ posts/ allowances are not being touched upon.
(5) The kind of marketing done by pvt players (flexi fares type), cannot be done effectively by the IR bureaucracy, who do not have experience of real marketing. In the matter of marketing, the IR officials were born with silver spoon, as the cost effective rail transport had been their monopoly. Wagons as well as berths, both used to be perennially in the shortage and the users used to queue before IR officials for wagons/ berths.This is the kind of marketing IR is used to!! They don't have to pursue, rather the customers are begging and ready to do any thing to get berth or wagons/rakes to transport the goods.!!
(6) Till now, IR was an isolated opposite regime (seller's market) inside a huge universal or global regime (buyer's market). All kind of internal efficiencies of IR were made up (or protected) by the inherent advantages of cost effective rail transport which was not available to private players. Now the protective regime is breaking, as the inefficient working/policy making cannot be sustained any longer due to development of the inefficient modes like Road and air through much more efficient management than IR!
(7) Mr Prabhu is really unlucky to be made captain of the an excellent but badly damaged ship (IR), when it is at the verge of sinking. He is presently being pulled down by a significant chunk of public. RM has an option to instruct IR bureaucracy not to go for any kind of fare increase and divert maintenance and project funds to pay for salary/fuel etc like other RMs have done in the past, and avoid bad publicity and let IR continue moving towards bankruptcy way. But he prefer to take the other route, i.e. taking bad publicity and improve IR in long run. DFC construction is going at break neck speed along most of the stretches, capacity augmentation, modernisation & electrification too going full throttle in-spite of fund crunch, is a welcome situation I have never seen in IR since last 25 years. Large number of path breaking steps to give better passenger amenities at stations as well as in trains are highly commendable. His humbleness and care, even for individual passengers has never been seen before in RMs.
(8)May be he is more a Chartered Accountant by heart and less of a politician. Let us hope things will go better after UP elections.
(9) In fact all the elections (parliamentary as well as assembly) should be held simultaneously in order to save huge costs involved in elections and disturbances faced by the nation/economy during election.