Too Big to Fail, Part II: “The Cartel You Cannot Sack!”
This series began with #Railwhispers’ “Too Big to Fail ???” 2 April 2026
The resignation of the man at the top of the Indian Railway Catering & Tourism Corporation (#IRCTC) has been accepted, and the file records personal reasons. In the corridors the reasons are told differently, but that is not the question that matters most. The question that matters is the small administrative one that always trails a departure like this. Who holds additional charge until a regular chief is chosen? and how long does until turn out to be?
Going by precedent, long. The selection through the Public Enterprises Selection Board (#PESB) has not even begun. Before the outgoing chief took over, the corporation was run by part-time chiefs for more than three years. A looking-after arrangement is meant to be a short bridge. At this corporation it has a habit of becoming the road itself.
Start with what the #corporation actually is. #IndianRailways has reserved three businesses for it alone: selling every online ticket on a reserved train, catering once the passenger boards, and the packaged drinking water he drinks in between. No rival competes for any of the three; #Policy simply does not permit it. This is a business that was granted, not earned, and that distinction explains almost everything that follows. Once a business is reserved rather than contested, the real fight is no longer with a competitor outside. It shifts inside, over who controls the reservation and who profits from it. That is the fight a #coterie of officers won.
The officer who has now left arrived with a reputation for handling difficult postings, and the few honest hands still inside allowed themselves to hope he would clean the place up. Instead, by the account of people who watched it happen, he was drawn into the very arrangement he was meant to dismantle. The word they use is blunt. He was sucked into the system. And the system, in their telling, is not a vague matter of culture. It is a coterie of officers who can manipulate the dominant vendors and decide careers.
The system that evolved leaves the organisation weak before its own dominant vendors, because the officers who run it hold their own interests above the organisation’s. The coterie can bend the dominant vendors whichever way it wants.
The dominant vendors are by now almost synonymous with railway catering, since IR has exited catering and hospitality altogether. Less noticed is how far this has moved into tourism. The corporation’s flagship heritage-train service, according to officers who will say so only privately, is routed and timed less by where passengers wish to travel than by where these vendors’ margins lie. Even the new business in conferences and exhibitions is said to be shaped not in the organisation’s interest but in someone else’s. In this mechanism, the vendors cannot be held at arm’s length. There is a word for that. Institutionalised overcharging, a structure in which the vendors become the vehicle for routing profit back to the officers running the show.
Step back from the palace politics and the record reads worse, because the corporation’s standing has little to do with how it serves the traveller. Its value on the stock market rests on the reservation, not on delivery. Take the reservation away, notionally, and ask what it does well. The ticketing system still buckles in the opening minute of the tatkal window, as it has for years. The #catering and #tourism supplier base has not been broadened, it has narrowed toward a small circle of dominant vendors. Even bottled water tells the story, a business reserved and owned outright, plant to platform, and still the corporation cannot keep the bottles on the trains that ask for them. A reserved business that cannot get water onto a captive market has no shortage of opportunity. What it lacks is the will to perform.
Which is why the small administrative question is really the large one. To hand additional charge to a man who will keep the seat warm is to keep the arrangement warm along with it. A #caretaker does not break a cartel. Actually He manages it in real terms, and the managing is exactly what brought the corporation here. What the ministry can do, having accepted one resignation, is not reach for a safe pair of hands but examine the next pair closely. What are this officer’s dealings with the dominant vendors. Has he ever taken a decision that cost entrenched vendors money. Can he blacklist, can he open a supplier base, can he stand up to the vigilance complaint that will certainly follow. These are uncomfortable things to ask of senior people, and they are the only ones worth asking, because the hardest fact about these vendors is that they reach into the postings themselves. The officer sent to discipline them may owe his chair to them.
A clean break, then, and not continuity dressed up as stability. The test is simple and can be applied this month. Start the regular selection now, on a fixed and short clock, so that looking-after does not harden into rule. Give charge only to someone whose record shows a decision that once cost powerful vendors money. Return the powers the chief executive is supposed to hold, and prise personnel and postings out of the directorate that also does business with the dominant vendors. Freeze fresh awards concentrated among a narrow circle of vendors in tourism until the eligibility rules that were bent are rewritten in the open. And publish the numbers, what the corporation pays its dominant vendors, and what its water monopoly actually supplies against what the trains demand. None of this is radical. It is the ordinary work of running a public enterprise for the public, which is exactly the work that has not been done.
The alternative is another long looking-after, another chief drawn into the same arrangement, another few years in which the corporation’s monopoly widens while its service does not. And the pattern does not stop at the pantry car. The next part follows the same logic onto the factory floor, where the vendors are larger, the sums are heavier, and the flaws are sealed inside the machine long before anyone is allowed to look.
The reboot, concretely
Five things the Ministry can do now, each checkable later:
- Start the PESB selection for a regular CMD immediately, on a fixed short deadline, so the interim charge cannot quietly become the norm as it did for three years before.
- Screen every interim and permanent candidate on one record: has any officer above him ever pushed him to favour a vendor, and did he refuse.
- Restore the Schedule of Powers to the CMD, and separate personnel and postings authority from the directorate that also handles the dominant vendors’ business.
- Order an independent, published review of how heritage-train itineraries, tourism eligibility and conference-and-exhibition contracts are decided, and which officer signed off.
- All departments of IR should publish, on a fixed cadence, payments to the dominant vendors against the sanctioning office, and Rail Neer supply against demand, so responsibility sits with the desk, not the vendor.