Brain Fog of Railway Board, Part-3

Time the Board Does a Why-Why on Itself

The Railway Board has written a circular about “root cause analysis” without performing one on its own directive!

#RailwayBoard Circular 2026/E&R/10(10)/1 mandates “root cause analysis of asset failures at ‘Divisional’ (#DRM) level.” The circular itself is overdue for one.

Readers may see our editorial position in these articles which have been widely quoted and discussed from senior most levels of government to the final working hand.

25.10.2025: “What is the role of a Division, Zone and Railway Board: Getting Basics correct, Part-I”

26.10.2025: “What is the role of a Division, Zone and Railway Board: Getting Basics correct, Part-II”

23.02.2026: “Brain Fog of Railway Board, Part-1”

24.02.2026: “Brain Fog of Railway Board, Part-2”

On 22 April 2026, the Railway Board issued letter no. 2026/E&R/10(10)/1, addressed to Divisional Railway Managers (#DRMs) of all Zonal Railways, directing that “asset failures” be subjected to “root cause analysis” at divisional level. The #Chairman & #CEORlyBd would personally review this analysis — randomly — department by department — division by division — through VC, with notice given on the day of the review itself.

General Managers of all Zonal Railways received a copy of the above letter.

Observe that sequence carefully. The principal addressees are DRMs. GMs got a copy. The Railway Board has routed a technical mandate around not one but two intermediate institutional layers—the Zonal HQ and its own dedicated technical organisation—RDSO—and planted it at the executing end of a three-tier administrative structure. The logic merits examination. Since the letter is itself about “root cause analysis”, it would be fitting to apply one.

Why-Why Analysis: Circular No. 2026/E&R/10(10)/1

Why 1: Why is this circular necessary?

Asset failures are not being analysed rigorously enough, and their “root causes” are not being systematically identified and addressed. That is a fair diagnosis. “Asset reliability” is a serious #Operational and #Safety concern. The intent is not in question.

Why 2: Why is it addressed to DRMs?

This is where the analysis earns its keep. The DRM heads a division — the operational and maintenance field unit of Indian Railways. A division runs trains, maintains track, manages stations, handles the passenger amenities with the safety and security, maintains punctuality, and delivers the final output. Its officers — Junior Engineers (#JEs), Senior Section Engineers (#SSEs) up to Senior Divisional Engineers (#SrDENs) — are executing maintenance in the field. They are not, by design, failure analysts.

The division does not carry Zonal-level failure trend data and also does not have the knowledge of assets specifications. It does not have access to network-wide comparative statistics. Its officers are not typically trained in structured reliability analysis frameworks. The #ICMS portal, referenced in the circular as the source of failure data, exists at all levels — but the analytical function, cross-failure correlation, and trend mapping reside institutionally with the departmental heads at Zonal HQ: the #PCME, #PCE, #PCSTE, #PCEE, and their respective wings.

Asking a DRM to conduct “root cause analysis of asset failures” is structurally similar to asking the shift #supervisor at a refinery to write the failure modes and effects analysis. The supervisor knows the plant. The supervisor does not have the tools, the comparative dataset, or the mandate, to produce the #FMEA.

Why 3: Why can’t the DRM do this?

Not because DRMs are incapable individuals, but most of them are incapable nowadays. The problem is structural. The DRM’s team at divisional level consists of officers managing live operations under perpetual time and resource pressure. They are simultaneously managing #punctuality targets, Amrit Bharat station works, infrastructure projects, and earnings — all with an inverted officer pyramid that has been discussed at length on this platform.

“Root cause analysis” requires time, data at scale, technical depth, access to design specifications, and institutional memory of failure patterns across zones and over time. None of these reside at divisional level by design.

Now consider what does reside at divisional level by design, and compare it with what the Railway Board maintains at its own doorstep: the Research Designs and Standards Organisation—RDSO—headquartered at Lucknow, reporting directly to the Railway Board.

RDSO’s mandate is not incidental to this discussion. It is the mandate. “#RDSO exists precisely to investigate failures, analyse asset performance trends, establish root causes at a systemic level, revise maintenance standards accordingly, and issue technical circulars that propagate corrective action across the entire rail network. It has dedicated directorates for track, rolling stock, electrical, and signal & telecom — each with the engineering depth and cross-network data access that a divisional team structurally cannot possess. RDSO is not a support function. It is the Railway Board’s own brain on technical matters.”

The Railway Board has an institution whose charter is root cause analysis of asset failures. It wrote a circular about root cause analysis of asset failures — and addressed it to DRMs.

Not to forget the technical directorates of Railway Board headed by Secretary level members.

Why 4: Why was the circular routed to DRMs, bypassing both Zonal HQs and RDSO?

This is the question that does not have a comfortable answer.

One reading: “the Board wanted to signal urgency by going directly to the field. There is a certain coercive efficiency to holding DRMs personally accountable in a VC with CRB & CEO/RlyBd on a few hours’ notice. There is also a certain administrative recklessness to it, because what it produces is not root cause analysis. What it produces is a slide deck assembled the night before by a team that had no business being asked the question.”

The other reading is more troubling. By routing around RDSO — its own technical arm — the Railway Board has implicitly communicated one of two things: “either that RDSO is not performing its mandate, in which case the circular should have been addressed to RDSO asking why; or that the Railway Board has simply forgotten that RDSO exists for precisely this purpose.” Neither reading reflects well on the institution that sits at the apex of Indian Railways administration.

This is not merely an organisational oversight. It is a signal of institutional amnesia. An organisation that bypasses its own research and standards body to ask field managers for technical failure analysis has, quietly and without fanfare, lost confidence in its own brain — or misplaced it entirely.

Why 5: Why has the Board issued a directive that misaligns task with organisational competence and bypasses its own technical institutions?

This is the root cause, and it is not comfortable to state plainly: “the Railway Board has, over time, developed a habit of managing railways in a way that treats the Board–Zone–Division structure as a notional convenience, and treats RDSO as a procurement and certification body rather than the failure analysis institution it was designed to be.” Directives arrive at the Division because that is where things happen and where accountability is most visible. The Zonal HQ and RDSO — each carrying functions the #Division cannot replicate — are bypassed not out of malice but out of a fog that has settled steadily over institutional roles.

The problem is that routing around these institutions does not fix them. It merely relocates a task to an entity less equipped to perform it, while leaving the more capable tier undisturbed and, critically, unaccountable.

What Should Have Been Done

If the Board’s concern is that asset failure analysis is not rigorous enough, the chain of accountability runs:

• Board → RDSO (for systemic and network-level failure pattern analysis and revised maintenance standards) →
• GMs → PHODs/PCAOs at Zonal HQ (for zone-specific trend review and corrective action planning) →
• DRMs (for field execution of prescribed corrective actions).

The Division executes. The Division does not research. That is not an insult to divisional officers — it is a description of what they were hired and trained to do, and what the railway’s organisational design correctly placed them to do.

The Stakes Are Not Abstract

It would be convenient to treat this as an internal organisational matter — a bureaucratic misstep, a circular that missed its addressee, a procedural lapse that will produce some awkward VCs and then be forgotten. That framing is incorrect.

Indian Railways carries approximately 2.3 crore passengers every day. Not lakh — crore. On any given day, that is more people than the entire population of several European nations, moving in steel boxes at speed, across a network maintained by the very field teams this circular is now asking to perform technical failure analysis instead of maintaining their assets?

Asset failures on the railway are not abstract entries in an ICMS portal. They are events that, left unaddressed, cascade into delays, derailments, and worse. The systematic identification and elimination of failure root causes is not a managerial exercise. It is a safety-critical function —

• When that function is assigned to the wrong tier of the organisation — away from the institutions with data depth and technical competence, and towards officers already stretched across a dozen competing operational demands — the quality of the analysis degrades.
• When the analysis degrades — corrective actions are missed.
• When corrective actions are missed — failures repeat.

This is the chain that a Why-Why analysis is supposed to interrupt.

This is the chain that a Why-Why analysis is supposed to interrupt.

That the Railway Board, in the very act of commissioning such analysis, has itself broken this chain by sending the mandate to the wrong address is not ironic. It is dangerous.

The Actual Root Cause

The Railway Board has written a circular about root cause analysis without performing one on its own directive. The asset that failed here is institutional clarity — about who does what, at which tier, and why each tier was designed the way it was—

• #RDSO was built to be the Board’s technical memory.
• #Zonal HQs were built to translate that memory into actionable maintenance frameworks.
• #Divisions were built to execute those frameworks reliably, at scale, every day.

That design is not broken. The memory of that design, however, appears to be.

On a network that moves 2.3 crore people daily, the cost of that particular failure is not measured in slide decks. It is measured in something considerably less recoverable.

The ‘5-Whys’ has produced the culprit: It is Railway Board’s top layer. Is anyone listening?
— #Railwhispers