Indian Railways Catering Mis-management

Do you know of anyone who might know of someone who has said he/she liked railway food? I have yet to come across one who relished - I mean, loved - a meal in the train. That our railway food is no good isn't worth writing about. What intrigues me is that railway caterers manage to serve meals so uniformly tasteless, every time.

I had occasion to try out rail meal during my recent travel to Vizag from Bangalore and back, by Prashanti Express. The menu varied, from brinjal in the day to beetroot at night for curry. There was variety, such as sambar, morkozahbu, bhaji, puri and rice. But there was little variation in taste for every meal.

Sambar, rasam are the kind of items amenable to fluctuating taste, even if cooked by the same hands. Some days your sambar gets a bit too hot; on another day it is rasam that is a little less salty; and, occasionally, the food turns out to be tasty, through sheer human error. There is no scope for such error in railway catering; their cooks, it appears, are trained never to err on the side of taste. This is an aspect of catering management, I thought, the country's best known rail management guru ought to highlight in his talks at IIM-A and management lectures to visiting students from Harvard, Stanford or wherever.

Prof. Lalu P Yadav can tell his Ivy League undergrad disciples how caterers in India's vast rail network manage to maintain standards of tastelessness and still sustain the demand for their meals. The server in my compartment (AS1, July 6, Bhubaneswar-bound Prasanthi) turned up with my dinner at 10 p m because there were 500 meals to be served that night and there was no one other than him to serve them.

Another distinct feature of our rail system that might interest students of communication management is the working of the public address system at Bangalore railway station. Our railways have public announcers who tend to betray supreme indifference to aspects of oral communication such as diction, phonetics and pronunciation. And then, while on Platform-6, one heard a clash of voices emanating from two different PA systems. Announcements overlap. Apart from being a strain on your years, clarity becomes a casualty in the clash of noises.

As one announcer belted out scripted messages about the delayed arrival of the Brindavan Express, there was a counter voice, from another system informing us about the status of the Mysore-bound train from Jaipur. The blare of announcements, delivered in Kannada, Hindi and English, not always in a listener-conducive tone and accent, made less sense than noise. You may wonder, as I did, why they can't have a centralised communication system, with all speakers at the station complex speaking in one voice. Railway authorities must have their reason for resorting to the twin P A system. Never mind, if passengers can't make much sense of the public announcements.

Yet another customer service feature pertains to availability of wheel-chairs at the Bangalore railway station. Porters were willing to produce a wheel-chair for you, at a price that is directly proportionate to the level of your helplessness. I paid Rs.60, beating down the initial asking price of Rs.150, to move my handicapped mother from platform 7 to 5.

Later I learned you could get a wheel-chair from the station manager's office by producing an ID card. There is also provision for requisitioning a wheel-chair by dialling a designated number. Oddly enough, the railway staff I ran into at the station were not aware of the number. One would have thought information on customer services such as availability of wheel-chairs and the contact phone number ought to be displayed on closed-circuit TV or electronic message boards and also announced through the public address system.