Two PGP students, Priyatham Swamy and Majula Vadde won the BusinessLine on Campus Case Challenge on the topic ‘Turning the Indian Railways around: Will it be a Bumpy Ride Ahead?’ The result of the contest was declared on April 17, 2016. The First Runner-up, Second Runner-up and the Fourth Runner-up position in the contest were also bagged by various teams of IIM Indore students only. The students received gift vouchers for their achievement.
The Case up for competition focused on analyzing the transportation giant’s problems and spelling out the strategy and roadmap it should follow. It discussed about problems like safety, railway revenue, passenger traffic, effective anti-collision systems and the competition it was facing with low-cost airlines. The contestants were asked to prepare a brief report analyzing the railway problems and challenges and give recommendations on the kind of strategy and roadmap the railways should follow.
Priyatham and Manjula’s report highlighted various problems like financial crunch, decreasing share of revenues from fright due to cross subsidization and sluggish industrial growth, lack of inadequate infrastructure leading to unmanned crossings, theft and other crimes and frequent accidents, improper hygiene and convenience and other issues like low employee productivity. The report also mentioned about the Railway Budget 2016-17, which addresses most of these problems through the three-pillar model — Nav Arjan, Nav Manak and Nav Sanrachna, which may take some time for the results of these efforts to become visible. With such strong and apt points and applicable solutions, Priyatham and Majula’s case secured the First Position.
The First Runner-up were Yogesh Vohra and Mayur Zope, Second Runner-up position was secured by Jyoti Gurah and Jolly Mondal and the Fourth Runner-up position was bagged by Dipankar Dhariwal and Tarun Kumar Madhei. All these are the students of PGP, IIM Indore.