JEDDAH, 17 March 2007 — There is news for those who thought that Lalu Prasad reached the pinnacle of his academic career when students from Harvard and Wharton came to listen to the railway minister. Actually, America’s love affair with Lalu has just begun.
Thirty-five students from the University of Texas and 22 from the University of Virginia met with Lalu yesterday. Lalu shared with the students the turnaround story of the Indian Railways, which recently posted huge profits for the first time.
“I told the students the mantra of the railways’ success story: honesty,” Lalu said.
“The 1.4 million railway officials have been working shoulder-to-shoulder with full dedication and honesty in order to face challenges. It’s because of this that we are where we are today,” he said. “The other two qualities which I told them to keep in mind were determination to achieve the goal and a vision to realize that.”
The visiting youngsters were clearly impressed.
John Hardy from the University of Virginia said: “The interaction session with the minister has been fruitful. While sharing the success story of the Indian Railways, he also mentioned the weaknesses that have to be worked upon.”
“He’s got the vision and the people around him to change the face of the railways,” said another student, Brian Briscoe of the University of Texas.
Premiere technical and business schools in the United States are inviting Lalu to give lectures on their campus. A look at the diary of the minister sheds some light on his popularity among prestigious business schools. Students from Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be arriving in India on March 26 for a lecture.
“He has been invited by Harvard Business School on April 18, Stanford University on April 14 and University of Chicago and the World Bank on April 10. Many other American universities have also extended invitations. They want to discuss the strategies that he applied in the functioning of the Indian Railways,” says Sudhir Kumar, a Lalu aide.
Earlier, students from Harvard Business School and HEC Management School in France went to India to study Lalu’s experiment with the Indian Railways. The students from Wharton and Harvard, who had visited earlier, compared Lalu to Jack Welch, the man who turned around the fortunes of General Electric.
During his interaction with Wharton and Harvard students, Lalu chose to call himself “Guruji” and explained to the students in Hindi how he had broken the Western myth that an unprofitable enterprise should be privatized and its employees downsized.
The students also asked him why he could not turn around Bihar in his 15-year rule of the state. “Bihar has no potential. Per capita income is low. There are constant floods. But the railways are like an empire. It has huge potential,” he said. It remains to be seen what new challenges the US students have in store for him now.
