KEY POINTS:
A 74-year-old railway engineer is an unlikely candidate to be a national hero. But Elattuvalapil Sreedharan is, quite literally, the man who put the trains on the tracks and made them run on time.
He has beaten all the odds - and the clock - and given the Indian capital Delhi a state-of -the-art metro, whose trains pull into sparkling platforms that are a good deal cleaner than the city's streets.
Eight years ago, when the Delhi Metro began building its first line, nobody gave Sreedharan a hound's chance in hell of pulling off the ambitious project on time. Construction projects in India had a habit of dragging on way past schedule and costing many times the original budget.
Sreedharan changed the rules of the game right from the start. He put workers in yellow hard hats and fluorescent jackets - both innovations at that time.
More importantly, he scoured the world for cutting-edge railway technology and drew up rigid timetables for the entire project.
"From the beginning we brought in international standards in everything from civil construction to safety and quality," he says. "We wanted to be among the best in the world."
In other parts of the world Sreedharan's commitment to global standards might not be so unusual. But in 1990s' India these were new, almost revolutionary, ideas. The sceptics predicted he would be ripping up roads and closing down parts of the capital for decades.
There was good reason for their scepticism. In Calcutta it had taken 22 years to build a 17km stretch of track. The Calcutta project, started in the early 70s, was finally completed after two decades of civic disruption only in 1995. Sreedharan worked on that project but was not in charge. "That wasn't the way to do it. The cost went up by 17 times," he now says.
But when he came to the Delhi Metro Sreedharan proved the sceptics spectacularly wrong.
The first trains began running dead on schedule last year. In about seven years, Sreedharan's crack team built 65km of track and stayed tightly within budget. Using the latest tunnel-boring techniques they put the network in place without causing traffic jams all over the city and bringing it to a standstill.
The moment the first trains started operating, Sreedharan became an instant media darling and national icon. The blunt, no-nonsense railwayman had, in a way, done more than just build 65km of railway lines. He had proved that Indians could pull off a mega-project on this scale without making a costly mess of it all.
It might seem far-fetched, but his feat did wonders for the national psyche.
For the railways, too, it was an impressive feat. The British laid the first railway tracks back in 1853 and the railway network was, perhaps, one of their greatest legacies. But the network that criss-crossed the country was so good that nobody bothered to expand it after independence.
In 1990 the Indian Railways, after many years of deliberation, decided to build the 760km Konkan Railway, which runs through the mountain ranges and forests on India's west coast. Sreedharan had just retired but was re-hired because of his formidable reputation for finishing projects on time.
The Konkan Railway was exceptionally complex, involving 150 bridges and more than 90 tunnels. Also, it ran up against local interest groups in Goa that tried to stop construction. Nevertheless, Sreedharan lived up to his reputation and had the first trains running absolutely on time.
So when the Delhi Metro was being conceptualised he was a logical choice. But it wasn't that simple. Sreedharan was already 67 years old and government rules forbade hiring anyone over 65. Finally, after much bureaucratic wrangling, the Prime Minister himself gave the green light to hiring him.
But Delhi, as befits a capital city, is an exceptionally political metropolis with lots of pulls and pressures. Sreedharan was savvy enough to figure this out and insisted that he must have complete freedom to pick his own team.
The Delhi Metro charter also gave the chairman strong powers that enabled him to override local politics and the city's multiple civic authorities. "I told them if you are serious I must be able to finish the project on time," says Sreedharan. "I didn't want it to drag on."
Inevitably, political tugs-of-war were fought above ground even as the Metro's boring machines inched forward ahead relentlessly. There were legal challenges from people whose land had been acquired. And there were environmental barriers to overcome. The Metro had to promise to plant 10 trees for every one that it cut down. For that it got land from the forest department, fenced it and paid for five years' maintenance.
"Getting permission to cut trees was a Herculean job," says Sreedharan. "Almost every case had to go to Delhi's lieutenant governor or the chief minister."
When it became clear that phase 1 of the Delhi Metro would be ready on time, the Government began thinking seriously about expanding it in different directions. So they gave Sreedharan another extension and gave him the green signal to build a 120km section by 2008. Also, another section to Delhi Airport has to be ready by June 2010, before the Commonwealth Games.
Even Sreedharan admits that these are tough deadlines, considering that it took seven years to build the first 65km. Nevertheless, he's moving on and this week another 3km stretch is being opened.
Through all this Sreedharan's - and the Metro's - reputation has stayed squeaky clean. Contracts for giant amounts are awarded all the time and the Metro has a reputation for probity on a scale that no government-controlled organisation has ever been able to achieve. Sreedharan himself leads a simple life, going to bed at 8.30pm and rising early to pray and do yoga.
The Delhi Metro effect is spreading to other Indian cities. After watching for years, convinced that it couldn't be done, cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Chennai (formerly Madras) are putting together blueprints for urban rail services. All the cities have hired Sreedharan as a consultant and they're ready to take on the septuagenarian fulltime if Delhi ever lets him retire.
But Sreedharan looks set to run and run and run - and always stay on time.
