Railway ministersays he has been working around that one key number, Rs 8.5 lakh crore, which he plans to invest in five years in Indian Railways (IR). In a freewheeling interview within Rail Bhawan, Prabhu delves into aspects of that plan, including revamping the railways’ data collecting cell into a department that analyses data and helps in the railway board’s decision-making process. Excerpts:Railways has to be a profitable organisation. It has to be economically sound. So, unless it is commercially driven, it can’t serve social interests. The Railways has suffered in the past mainly because of lack of investments . In fact, the Railways is a story of numbers. Falling operating ratio is a number; falling electrification is a number; falling track renewal is a number. But the question is how we will arrange the money to correct those numbers. But arranging money should not be just going to the finance ministry (with a begging bowl). The finance ministry is not waiting with unlimited amount of money to be splurged. The finance ministry is not Bill Gates or Emir of Kuwait — sitting with a lot of money and not knowing how to spend it.So, I began with the number of Rs 8.5 lakh crore (total investments in IR for five years, as was announced in his first Rail Budget in February this year). In my opinion we should be able to double that number to (close to) $300 billion in the next five years. This number is required for the railways to be up and going.Raw data has no value unless those are analysed properly. Pentagon may be collecting more data than us. Google every day collects so much of data. But data finally needs to be used for management solutions. So, I am converting our data collection department into a data analysis department. Data per se has no meaning unless you convert those data into actionable points. We should not just collect data, we should be able to analyse those data for our decision-making process. We must use the data for outcomes.We are changing the accounting system completely. It’s not just about moving from single entry to double entry accounting as has been suggested by some committees. We are going beyond it. We are converting budgeting to expenditure to output to outcome. We are integrating management information and management accounting, costing etc all into one. We are in the process of roping in some of the best IT companies to provide us the software solution. Because of the sheer volume of data that we have, it’s far more important for IR than any other department to work on a management information system. And the management information system must capture the operating data in a manner that those can be interpreted and used. Our ultimate objective of data is to take informed management decisions.