Word: freighting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...studied by visiting business students from places such as Harvard, Wharton and INSEAD. The first step: speed things up - not the trains themselves but the turnaround time between the end and beginning of each new trip. In 2001 the average time to unload, repair, refuel and reload a freight train in India was 7.1 days. Now it is just five days, which means that 800 trains leave on a new journey each day, rather than just 550. Given that an additional trip can earn up to $15 million, the improvement made an important contribution to IR's bottom line...
...Yadav is certainly lucky that he's heading Indian Railways during a period of tremendous growth in India. The company is minting money hauling freight for mines thanks to the massive demand for iron ore in China, to cite just one example. But you also have to be clever enough to cash in. Contracts with mining firms are now linked to the price of ore rather than "set in concrete like in the old socialist fashion," says Kumar. "You have to make the best use of the opportunities the global market throws up. Before, we were operating like some Mother...
...more charity. IR wants to compete. Hoping to grab more of the long-haul freight business lost to truckers in recent years, rail bosses plan to borrow at least $15 billion to build a dedicated fast-freight corridor between Mumbai, New Delhi and Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). They also have big plans for some of the 1 million acres (420,000 hectares) of land that IR owns along rail lines and around stations and shunt yards. Real estate developers are currently bidding to overhaul the first of 16 major stations. At New Delhi's central station, which is likely worth billions...
...slow. A 1,378-mile (2,217 km) trip from New Delhi to Goa just before Christmas, for instance, took me 35 hours, almost a day longer than a train trip over a similar distance in Europe would take. Because of a lack of equipment and tiny station platforms, freight is sometimes thrown from trains in heaps. The heavier loading, critics charge, has caused more breakdowns. (Kumar denies this.) Older carriages can be dirty, shabby and full of cockroaches - and that's in upper class. "If our carriage, which is the best on the train...
...also championing a massive public works project - the planned Grand Korean Waterway, a controversial 336-mile canal that would link the country's industrial northwest to the southeast city of Busan, south Korea's largest port. The government says the canel will attract tourists, provide cheaper freight transport and stimulate economic development in the interior. Environmental groups and opposition politicians are calling the project a boondoggle, although Lee insists the $16 billion project can be privately funded so that taxpayers won't have to pick up the tab. "Obviously, [the canal] would help the economy," in part because it would...