Here is the transcript and summary of Sudhanshu Mani’s talk titled “The Journey of Train 18” at TEDxHyderabad conference.
Listen to the audio version there:
TRANSCRIPT:
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I’m here to tell you the story of the first indigenous semi-high speed train built in India. This was a homegrown product, a rolling stock, a railway vehicle from concept to design, to engineer, to manufacture to validation and testing done entirely by a team of Chennai railwaymen. This is not the story of one man, this is the story of a Chennai team which has showed to the world that India can also do it.
I come to you as a railwayman for life. Indian railways have a long 170-year-old history and legacy, lot of romance, the fight for that window seat through which the marvel of Indian way of life, the magic of India passed you by. Lifeline of the nation as they say, but I’m not here to talk to you about that romance. I’m going to talk to you about this.
As a young boy and as a railwayman, I always wondered why our trains for last 50, 60, 70 years look the same, and why not a modern train set with higher speed, more comfort and better aesthetics.
Well, what’s a modern train set? You are familiar with a train which has a number of coaches and a locomotive on either end. They get coupled and decoupled as per requirement and destination for maintenance. But a modern train set is a number of coaches permanently coupled together and all the equipment for powering, air conditioning, lighting and what have you is all placed on the train. There is no locomotive.
Now, it has many advantages. It has redundancy, comfort, it is more efficient, the maintainability is better. Added to that, we have this reversal problem in other coaches. This train can reverse itself. Since you can pack more equipment on the train, it has more power, more speed and more acceleration and more deceleration as well.
From one cab to the other cab, if it’s a 16-coach train like our own train, you can walk from one end to another without realizing that you are crossing a coach to coach because the wide gangway is a lot of comfort. So if it has so many advantages, and this is the trend world over for last 25, 30 years, they don’t make for this speed range any locomotive haul train.
Why is it that we don’t have these trains? The answer, I’m sorry, is not very complimentary to Indian railways because we have departments. One department maintains the coaches, another one maintains the locomotives. Now everything is on one. So who’s going to own it? Whose empire is it going to be? And that fight for last 25, 30 years, with debates and procrastination, and we reached nowhere.
In addition, there has been a lobby to import these trains, long time another lobby opposing it, which was losing the empire. Fortunately, the import did not take place, but mine was a lone voice. I was a part of the lobbying as well, but I always said that you can’t stop a good thing, you can delay it.
So why not sit down and decide what’s good for the country and give it to us? But it remained, my lone voice, just a dream. In August 2016, I was due to become a general manager, and I asked for, and was posted in Integral Coach Factory, Chennai. This was set up in 1950s, the vision of the then Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to make India self-reliant, in this case, self-reliant in making world-class current technology coaches.
It has gone through many expansions since then, numbers keep rising. But if we even have a world record for making, having made the maximum number of coaches in the world, but more of the same. In 1950s, Premier Zhou Enlai came to ICF and said, “Every Orient should be proud of this factory. I would like Chinese engineers to come and learn here as to how to make coaches.” But the vision was never realised because of more of the same, numbers, no variety.
And today, where are we, we are far behind, we make a beeline to go to China and learn from them. Well, when I landed, I found a very dedicated and great team of officers. My fortune is already there in ICF, and the staff, the design and the manufacturing staff, they had this ennui written on their face, more of the same, doing more of the same. They were raring to go, they had that technical chutzpah, that audacity to try something new and it needed generalisation.
Well, adopting some simple measures of leadership, like empathy, like openness, shedding of the stifling protocol and bureaucracy that you have in railways, welcoming ideation and recognising those who work and coming down hard on those who did not, we started making some progress.
One example, in our foyer of the administrative block, we had this place, corner, like most government offices, where the janitor used to keep brooms and buckets. We transformed it into a family tree, all 11,000 faces, not one smaller one, not one bigger, all placed there, and it became a place for selfies. And this was the new ICF, which was trying to burgeon, and this was my opportunity.
More of the same, but an exponential growth in outturn. And in 2018, when we made 2,500 free coaches, we thought we became the biggest factory in the world. Next year, when we made 3,262, we settled all doubt and became the biggest factory in the world. Only factory, through some large-scale solar installation, we became the only carbon-negative company of Indian railways, generating more renewable energy than consuming.
12.5 megawatt was generation, 12 megawatt was our consumption. Picasso has said that art is a way of washing away the dust of everyday life from your soul.
It exhilarates, uplifts, motivates. Why not try visual art as a means to encourage engineering motivation?
So I tried visual art all over the factory, sculpture from scrap, and people wonder whether Integral Coach Factory today is an art gallery in a factory or a factory in an art gallery. And we attacked this more of the same business also on a smaller scale. In two years, we did have some trains which are now running. Turned out where the look was changed, all using the same staff and the same officers.
This was my opportunity to do something more and bigger. When I am with a smaller audience, I ask just to do anything, anywhere, what do you need? First and foremost, answer is leadership, passion, will, determination. But I say, answer is very simple, love what you do.
And from that follows, you love your organization, you love your colleagues. Start with love. Because human resource is your most important resource, irrespective of all the machines and wherewithal you can have, unless they are with you, you will not lead anywhere. One poet has said that, ik lafz-e-mohabbat ka adnaa ye fasana hai. This word love has a small story. simte to dil–e–ashiq, faile to zamaana hai. We all talk of all the ills all around us. Everything is bad, lot of concerns.
But we forget that small dot of influence, where we can work and do something. shikwa e zulmat e shab se to kahin behtar tha. It’s better than complaining about darkness, ki apne hisse ki ek shamma jalate jate. This was the time to light the candle of my dream.
And we are told that you must live your dream, first you must look after yourself, your bread and butter. But don’t let that dream die. You never know when the opportunity will present itself and you can realize your dream. And this was the time for me.
So platform, vision, fortune was with me, opportunity. But there were doubts and challenges. First doubt, where is the sanction? You need to get it from the ministry. So I said, I’m your leader, I’ll go to the ministry, get you the sanction. But what a foolhardy person I was. In the railway board, derision, skepticism, negativity, this guy is trying to spin a yarn. I was not going anywhere, but the chairman railway board knew me, I went to him.
I said, do you think we can do it? He said, I think you can do it, but railway board is holding me back. I said, you are the chairman. You import what you want, give me a sanction for two trains. And I will do it at one third the cost. And if you’re not going to do it, I am falling at your feet.
Right now, not leaving it till you give me the sanction. Ladies and gentlemen, somebody will kill your vanity someday, it’s better that you kill it yourself today. I come back to my team and I said, here’s the sanction. Let’s move. They said, yes, we are capable, we’ll do it. But what if we fail, 200 crores, who will be the scapegoat?
Our doubts are traitors, which make us lose the good we might win by fearing to attempt. Only a mounted soldier falls in a battlefield. The days of your crawling are over. You will be a mounted soldier, all of you. And if we deliver this good train, first of its kind in India, the credit is all yours. If we fail, this old man is going to retire in one year. What can they do to him? Don’t worry.
Now from now on, the team will connect, kill your vanity. And if you make a mistake, own up. Because from every mistake, you will learn and become a better engineer. Sometimes fault can be worse than the excuse.
That done, they said, what will be our mode? We have been getting all these trains all these 60, 70 years through technology transfer. You bring in, you order on a multinational, you bring in some trains, then knock down kids, then you start making it, but you make it worse than what you brought 15 years back. Why?
Because technology cannot be transferred. It’s an oxymoron. Technology is not just a set of drawings and specifications and documents. It lives in the mind and the heart of the creator. Can you transfer that? So we will do it on our own, good or bad. We will not look up to anybody sitting on a high pedestal. It will be entirely our train and we are going to make it.
Yes, but the Bard has also said that you should never be a foolish, wise person. You should be a wise fool. There may be some areas like a bogie design, which has never been done, which we can’t do, so we will engage consultants. Consultant has no stake in supplying in future. He will sit with you. That’s the contract.
Every single line that he draws, every word that he writes in the spec will be done along with you so that you learn and the entire know-how, entire know-why, the entire eye-peer is with us. And that’s how this model worked.
And only one more doubt, they said that we are in April 17, such a project usually takes 36 to 42 months. You will retire in December 18. We’ll be left midway. New leader may say that, why are you doing this risky job? More of the same is better. I said, yes, that’s a problem, but I have a solution. Our mind may not be where the European or the American or the Japanese mind is, but we are Indians, we can work like donkeys. We can work like donkeys.
And we will work like donkeys day and night, 24-7. We will turn out this train before December 2018, calendar year 2018. And to remind everyone, this train is being called train 18 from today. And now, if you have it in you, the purpose, courage, and the valour, this is the time to show it.
This was the beginning and, in a way, end of my story, because rest is a matter of only hard work, glitches, hitches, but synergy, solving it. And as we were building it, some hype was also created, so we were apprehensive that what if it fails? But anyway, fortune was with us because we were working hard. Come 27th October, the train was finally unveiled.
In a ceremony unparalleled in any factory of Indian railways, the Dholu-Kunita band from Bangalore, flurry of that. And after that, the train was sent to trial and validation online. And sometime in the first week of December, the first time any train in India went above 180 kilometers per hour, reached that speed. Some more tests and validation.
And it was put in service as Vande Bharat Express by the Prime Minister himself, running between Varanasi and Delhi. Ladies and gentlemen, we just built a train. It’s not a rocket or Chandrayaan. But the love we got from the country went.
Why? Because I thought, the first time they thought, that this was a product of our own, made by us. And a thousand such projects are burgeoning, ladies and gentlemen. All it needs is leadership with passion, empathy, and a sense of purpose.