His detractors may call him a 'clown and a joker', but there's no denying that Lalu Prasad Yadav has a flair for business. The way he turned around the Indian Railways -- written off by the Rakesh Mohan Committee and termed a white elephant by the government -- is the stuff business curriculums are made of. And it is not just IIMs who want to fete Laluji for posting a fund balance of Rs 11,280 crore in March 2006, even the premier international business schools are joining in.

Harvard Business School and HEC Management School, France, have shown interest in turning Lalu's experiment with the railways into case studies for aspiring biz graduates. For HEC, the crux lies in how a railway system, under the jurisdiction of a coalition government, can be put on the road to success.

Explains Karine Lejoly of HEC, "We are looking at making the Indian Railways a part of our course. While nothing has been finalised as of now, I will be visiting India in October-November to talk to the concerned officials."

Meanwhile, Professor Steven R Ditmeyer, a former faculty member of Harvard and now on deputation to National Defense University, will also be visiting India later this year to study the railways model.

Sudhir Kumar, officer on special duty for Lalu Prasad, was in France for a conference recently where he met Professor Ditmeyer. "The professor is intrigued by the man behind the success story of the railways and will be visiting India soon to learn more about him as well as the turnaround.

His subject of the case study would be -- How has a man with no formal education brought about a change of this magnitude? On basis of his view, Harvard Business School will consider a case study on the railways," says a senior official.

Prof G Raghuraman from IIM-A, who first introduced Lalu in their curriculum, says, "We are not just working on the facelift that Lalu has given to the railways but also his personality, the team he works with and the initiatives he has taken. It was not as if Lalu applied some new principles, he was just the guy who said, 'Let's get down to it'."