Ashwani Lohani, new Chairman of Railway Board.
NEW RAILWAY Board Chairman Ashwani Lohani will visit a railway station to interact with field staff and passengers on Friday, something chairmen are not known to do. Those who have worked with Lohani in the railways say this is his working style — energising the ranks for performance by personally reaching out to workers, down to the lowest level. On Wednesday evening when news of the approval from Cabinet’s Appointments Committee came, senior officials in Air India, according to eye-witnesses, started crying. Lohani was the Chairman and MD of Air India.
“I am sad to be leaving Air India. I wish them all the best,” Lohani told The Indian Express. “I will visit a station on Friday.” A day after the Khatauli accident, Lohani posted on Facebook his take on what is wrong with the Railways. “The tragic railway disaster is a glaring symptom of the crying need for structural and process reforms cutting across hierarchies down upto the ground level that this great organisation needs, along with a genuine focus on HR. Indeed a very sad day,” he wrote.
Lohani’s departure from the railways three years ago was as dramatic as his comeback. The departure was the result of a feud between factions in the Railways’s mechanical department. Lohani, a 1980 officer of the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers, was not allowed to take the post of Secretary, Railway Board, in 2014 by a section that controlled the railway bureaucracy and Lohani’s department then.
Around this time, a number of multinational giants in the field of rolling stock manufacturing offered him lucrative positions, it was heard, but Lohani refused. Departmental rivalry ensured Lohani’s experience remained underutilised. At this juncture, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan requested Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu to relieve Lohani so he could oversee Madhya Pradesh Tourism. It was from here that Lohani went to Air India.
The Indian Express is privy to the fact that every possible hurdle was created by the then prevailing bureaucracy in the Railways to process the paperwork for Lohani’s deputation, including raising an objection to Lohani’s contribution to newspapers, saying it ran afoul of service rules.
Lohani was also “counselled” — an administrative action — when local staff failed to lay the red carpet for then minister Mallikarjun Kharge in the Lucknow division. He was the Chief Mechanical Engineer of Northern Railway, stationed in Delhi at that time. Lohani was then made to head the Indian Railway Organisation for Alternative Fuels in East Delhi’s Laxmi Nagar, which has little to do with core railway operations.
Incidentally, when the Comptroller and Auditor-General came out with its audit report on the Commonwealth Games in 2010, the Delhi division with Lohani as its Divisional Railway Manager got the most praise for the management of work.
