An Ode to Audit

Nearly fifteen years ago I was posted as the Addl. Divisional Railway Manager of Nagpur Division in the South East Central Railway. We had a huge narrow gauge network in the Division, the vastest in the world at 700 kilometres. The railway line passed through thick forest and connected many stations, which had no road connectivity. The narrow gauge trains were the only means of communication available to the poor villagers and tribals inhabiting these lands. The famous Satpura Express ran on this network between Balaghat and Jabalpur. The network has now been converted to Board Gauge and the romance of narrow gauge is gone for ever.

Nainpur was a major junction on the narrow gauge network and was frequented by Divisional officers for inspections. A night stay at Nainpur would help them inspect many segments during a single visit. Train journey from Nagpur to Nainpur would take eleven hours and was extremely tiresome and backbreaking what with sharp curves and lurching of the carriages, which were fifty to a hundred years old and had poor suspension. Even the villagers would not travel such long distances. They used the trains to connect with nearby villages or small towns. Students would go to school and vegetable growers would sell their produce in nearby consumption centres.

Railway Officers going to Nainpur or Seoni would travel by road. Roads were rather good and even though they traversed the same forests, it was possible to cut diagonally and reach Seoni or Nainpur in just three to four hours. So, one could leave early morning one day, do some useful work that day and the next day and come back the next evening. Going by train would have wasted too much time. This doesn’t mean that tracks on the rest of the network was not inspected or attended. That was done in short stretches over a number of days.

Well, one fine day I got a letter from the Audit Officer questioning why officers were not travelling by train. After all they were railway officers and must travel by train. All written replies about the duration of journey and time being of essence was dismissed by him. I asked him in a meeting if a State Road Transport Corporation officer always traveled by bus, or did he sometimes travel by train and air too. But, he would have none of it.

Finally, when nothing seemed to work, I said in a tripartite meeting (the Executive, Railway Finance Officer and the Audit team) that all future tripartite meetings would be held in Nainpur and that all of us would travel by train. That was a meeting every month and would have taken three to four days of staying out in near wilderness,  not to speak of the bone-shattering journeys to and fro.

The Audit team was stunned. Said, “Sir, please write some justification once again. We will close the case. And, they did.