Harvard, Wharton learn from Lalu

A team of 130 students from the top B-schools comes to Delhi to meet the railway minister

NEW DELHI: Lalu Prasad Yadav’s fame has traveled faster than his trains. After making news across the world following an impressive lecture session for Indian students at IIM-Ahmedabad on the success of the Indian Railways, he has now taught foreign students a thing or two on management.

Impressed by the minister’s fame and “charisma”, Ivy League schools — Wharton and Harvard — have sent their students for management lessons from India’s Railway Minister. And Lalu once again floored all as he talked in his inimitable style about the success stories of “the world’s only major government-owned, profit-making railways”.

And if the minister is to be believed, he went to the class without any preparations. “What is there to prepare? Whatever we do everyday we will tell them. I’ve been to their countries too. Their railways are beautiful but running in losses. That is why they are interested in us, to see how we have completely turned failure into success,” Lalu said.

A team of 100 students from Harvard Business School and 30 from Wharton, with seven professors from both institutions, had come all the way to meet the minister, about whom they had heard much about.

The classroom was set up in the National Rail Museum’s auditorium and Lalu Prasad, dressed in his traditional kurta pajama topped by grey pullover, had the students and their professors captivated as he narrated to a somewhat bemused but spellbound audience the turnaround story of the ‘Great Indian Railways’.

Lalu addressed them in his casual style laced with witticisms that evoked much laughter: even those who could not follow the dialect laughed politely. He spoke in Hindi sprinkled with English words whose rustic pronunciation often left the listener wondering what he really meant.

“When the responsibility of railways was given to me, it was in a state of bankruptcy,” he told the students, discussing the findings of the Rakesh Mohan Committee which had forecast that Indian Railways would go bankrupt soon.”