Mr. Bojji Rajaram,  Indian Railway Service Engineers, Government of India

           

Born on 1^st Feb.1945, Yellamanchille, Andhra Pradesh, India is currently the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Konkan Railway Corporation a Public Sector Undertaking with an asset base of 3,600 crores.  He graduated from Andhra University obtaining Bachelor of Engineering (Civil)  with 1^st Class Distinction  and also establishing a record of being the University's first rank holder as well as combining the responsibilities of being a General Secretary and President of the University's students union.  The same year 1966, on invitation he joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur obtaining his Master of Technology degree in Structural Engineering and further continued thereafter in 1970 work as Research Scholar pursuing doctoral programme.  Though the aptitude was for continuing with the research because of certain inequity shown to one of his colleagues he differed with the Director of the Institution, chose to write the All India Competitive examination to join the Indian Railway service of Engineers, Ministry of Railways, Government of India. It was also in IIT Kharagpur, that IBM computers entered his life and the digital world has been his most comfortable working environment. He is currently Chairman Of Computer Society of India, Navi Mumbai Chapter. 

 

Having joined the Railways in the year 1970 till 1979 he worked in various capacities on the field in the operations and maintenance of rail tracks, bridges, buildings and formation.  The period from 79 to 89 was spent in pursuing the Research and Development programme pertaining to Railway technologies, as well as, designing and consultancy to foreign countries like Jordan, Zambia and Austria.  He also received specialised training in General Management as well as, construction of project management in UK.

 

As a field officer, in the initial years of service he has to his credit 4 awards and 3 publications in the technical journals.  During the period that he spent on research and development as well as, consultancy he has to his credit more than 350 research and test reports published from Research, Designs and Standard Organisation, 4 Patents in India and 4 countries United States of America, United Kingdom, Australia and Bangladesh, also granting Patent for his 'Resilient Clip'.  In addition, he has path breaking new theories  published in reputed International Journals - 'Rail International' published from Brussels giving new insights  into vibrations between wheel and rail.  In fact, his work became a reference work for designing of high-speed locomotives.  During this period of research and development he was involved in preparing the futuristic Chapter for the planning group technology for railways in the year 85-86 laying down what should be future technologies to be adopted by railways beyond the year 2000.

 

He gained very deep experience while implementing his own microprocessor based 'RAMTRAK System as an Inventor to incorporate in the track maintenance machines in Austria during the period 1986-88.  It was in 1989 that a futuristic 'Sky Wheels' urban transport concept was unveiled by him in the University of Bologna, Italy, while considering the role of rail based transport systems for the year 2000.  It is the same concept, which he developed and now engineered and presented to the world as 'Sky Bus Metro' the unique solution for the urban problems that combines the flexibility of door-to-door service with mass transit capacity of a railway.  It also provides a holistic solution in urban areas where not only people but cargo also is handled.  It paves the way for a paradigm shift for urban transportation for the new millennium leading to development of intelligent transport systems.

 

Contrary to normal view, he believes that any infrastructure development should improve the quality of life by offering better services with reduced cost of service. 'Sky Bus Metro' is a typical example of the same, Further his work of inventing the 'Anti Collision Device' and design of the 'Raksha Kavach' as well as, 'Satdham Systems' for rail operations will redefine the rail operations.  In the last 2 1/2 years the technologies that he has developed and presented, to summarize are Sky Bus Metro, Anti Collision Device, Moving Block System, Satyadham System, protection for level crossing gates etc. Self Stabilising Track, Rolling Stock Health Analysis, all of which reduce the capital cost of construction of the rail based mass transit as well as, freight transit systems, while improving the safety, reliability and causing the quantum jump in productivity.

 

During the period 90-97 he was associated from the stage of inception of the Konkan Railway project as the first engineer.  Planned, raised funds and executed the first BOT project in Asia costing almost 3,600 crores.  As first Chief Engineer Goa, he introduced for the first time a very innovative concept of continuous monitoring of environmental impact through satellite images and used the remote sensing capabilities of the satellites to establish beyond doubt that the project activities resulted in improved environment and ecology.  In fact, his work is published in the International Journal of Remote Sensing, published by Taylor & Francis Ltd., UK. first of its kind in the world.  As Chief Engineer he faced tremendous pressures from various lobbies, public agitations but, addressed all the environmental concerns satisfactorily.  The highest court of the land Supreme Court as well as, a Public Commission headed by a Hon’ble Justice of the Supreme Court ultimately up held all his actions.  The engineering and fixing of the railway alignment in Goa thus became a case study for many and the Justices declared him as an outstanding engineer, which is a great tribute.  This period also gave very valuable insight in handling the public, their emotions, and cross culture perception.  Apart from the technical and financial problems, settling and managing very complex tenders for tunnel projects earth works, stations, signals etc as Director Projects for the Corporation and later on as Managing Director it has been a period of achievement to have successfully completed and to have personally taken the first train across the last completed Pernem tunnel in the year 1998 on 26^th January, considering that the line is 760kms long with 90 tunnels 2000 bridges and millions of cubic meters of earthwork and hundreds of thousands tons of concrete and steel which was a mammoth task well achieved.  The BBC as “Envy of Western World” has praised the work.

 

  During the project execution also he has innovated different methods of monitoring the execution of the project by redefining the parameters to be watched linking to the remaining time available and the desired rates of progress coupled with a dynamic balancing of resource moblisation to achieve the objective.  The entire process was software driven written by him.  In the area of track structures also first time perhaps in the world for heavy axle loads of 25t and high speeds, ballast-less maintenance free tracks over 20kms in tunnels was constructed based on his design taking recourse to his published work “A new theory of rail-wheel interaction.  Four years in operation the ballast-less tracks have met all the expectations.  He is also instrumental and spearheaded the conceptualisation and design of the entire railway application package from the year 93 onwards.  He not only designed the entire systems on intranet tools, but also organised the various task forces to prepare the SRS and the CDD documents and saw to it that the complex 18-module system is brought alive by the time the railway operation started in the year 98.  It is a one and only one of its kind Railway Application Package, on the same lines as SAP is for manufacturing industry, which is developed within the country and which has made Konkan Railway to be the leading railway to have the best IT product anywhere in the world.  It combines real time decision-making and control of all the trains, monitoring of all revenues as well as expenditure, asset management and advising in real time public on the Internet - the entire process is automated with unlimited capacity to grow with the organisation.  It is a tribute that the corporation won the best prize in the country for best business practices based on IT tools, awarded by CIO magazine after comparing with more than 100 companies in the country (year 2001).

 

            He has also innovated in terms of introducing self defense teams in the railways deviating from the conventional dependence on uniformed man for protecting properties by empowering  the Konkan Railway man and women through Goju-Ryu-Karate-Do.  Almost 1/3 of the staff strength is under training. They have won gold as well as bronze medals in the national levels. It is a tribute that the Japanese society recognised and donated a very magnificent rolling trophy to Konkan Railway Corporation.  The entire Konkan Railway staffing pattern and management structure has been designed by him to be substantially different from what the traditional Indian Railways are working with by implementing the Railway Application Package (RAP) developed by him as well as by designing maintenance-free assets. A fresh look at the operations and maintenance organization structure was taken resulting in just about 3200 people managing Konkan Railway as compared to the normal requirements of 12,000 currently being used on Indian Railways for the same level of assets and operations.  In turn this helped cutting down the cost on operations and the corporation has been improving its net revenue in the last 3 years by 30% per annum.   Further the Roll-On Roll-off project achieving synergy between the road traffic and the rail traffic and different model of health care for their employees to improve services but at reduced cost have been his contribution to improve the revenue as ell as, reduce the cost while assuring better quality of health standards.

 

Having observed the Head-on collisions and Side collisions on the Indian Railways with heavy toll on human life, he took up the challenge almost single handedly and produced the ‘ACD’ Anti- Collision device, which when mounted on two moving objects, taking inputs from global position system or from tachometer will have necessary intelligence to prevent any untoward accidents like collision, utilising their communication capabilities as well as empowerment to stop the movement or divert the direction of the movement.  The product has proven itself on Indian Railways and it is now going in for extensive field application.  He has also offered the same product for preventing September 11^th type accident for the aircrafts.

 

 

 

For his work on the ACD he has also received recognitions and awards from independent national level bodies.  Currently he is seriously working on the Sky Bus Metro project, Self Stabilising Tracks Rolling Stock Health analyst, moving block system and Satdham Safety Systems which when implemented will not only improve the safety of operations but also reduce capital cost and cause a very major paradigm shift of transportation scene on the path to evolve the intelligent self correcting fault tolerant user friendly transport system of the new millennium.