Another Pauperising Railway Budget

Another Pauperising Railway Budget

Union Railway Minister Pranav Kumar Bansal quoted Kautilya to emphasise the importance of Artha or money to any enterprise. It made one sit up in hope, expecting him to make strong moves to restore the railway’s financial health.

But it was only so much flattery to deceive with other couplets of poetry strewn about as well. Praise for Mr. Bansal’s tepid efforts came only from partisan supporters such as Finance Minister Chidambaram and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who made the surreal comment that it was “reformist”.

In the end, Mr. Bansal made much of wiping out the Indian Railway overall losses of Rs. 24,000 crores. But, his ambition is limited to putting about Rs. 30,000 crores back into the till by 2014. The entire budget speech smacked of unrealistic, unconvincing aspiration, long laundry-lists of detail, but  was abjectly timid in real terms.  

Mr. Bansal made announcements on many additional facilities, factories and trains, carefully ignoring Opposition ruled states, and spoke improbably of raising an unprecedented amount of Rs. 100,000 crores via the often problematic PPP method. 

He was also selling everyone short, or has set himself very low standards, when he put a figure of a mere Rs. 94,000 crores towards the requirement for development! The UPA II Government seems self- satisfied with tinkering at change and ignores transformation altogether .  It has taken the annual nature of the Railway Budget much too literally, and is quite opaque on the need   for continuity of progress.

 The Indian Railways are hardly fit for the 21^st century, one needs to see any modern railway system abroad for this point to be driven home. And with the recent sharp deterioration in safety and security, and other standards, large tranches of the better-off  middle classes have abandoned train travel altogether in favour of aeroplanes.   

Yet the Government, its Railway Minister and senior Railway Board officials, brazenly indulged in statistical jugglery to talk of declining accident rates. If there are hundreds of obscure train routes, they do help to dilute the statistics on routine accidents and deaths caused thereby on most, if not all the busiest routes! To boldly emphasise this sophistry is to insult the intelligence of ordinary people. Law and order on board trains, replete with muggings, robberies, rapes and murder, is also increasingly common.

Ours may be a large, if not the largest, railway network in the world, but it is highly antiquated and redolent of the colonial period. And the modernist moves such as e-ticketing and wi-fi on select trains, while most welcome, resemble the effort to keep the doughty Ambassador car going.

 Adding Isuzu engines, power brakes, better wiring and some limited electronics, do not still a modern car make. The fact is, it is a chariot from the fifties and retrofitting it is the first cousin to nostalgia. It makes little sense.

Similarly, the first Railway Minister from the Congress Party after 17 years did not venture to increase passenger fares even as he cited, multiple times, the costs of services were outstripping income at every turn.

Raising freight rates is inflationary, but it has been done.  Raising passenger fares is not, but it was not done, stating that they have been raised recently. But that was a minimal increase, and one needs to do it almost as often as the change in diesel, petrol and LPG. An attempt to align just petroleum price hikes has been attempted on freight rates, but many other things need to be brought up- to- date to cope.

Mr. Bansal has decided to raise marginally more revenue, raising freight rates by 5% on average. This is not enough to even meet rising costs, let alone modernise freight handling systems and processes. However, rates for reservations on tatkal basis, and on superfast trains, have thankfully been hiked. But because the vast majority of rail travellers are not being made to pay more, neither can the services be improved for them.

Sixty- seven new express trains have been added, but nothing has been earmarked for the updating of infrastructure. New trains have been announced, assuming that they actually see the light of day, they must perforce run on the age-old rails. This, and ancient signalling equipment etc. is what compromises safety along with free access to undesirable elements.

The sacking of Gopalganj station in Madhya Pradesh, minutes after the Railway Minister finished his speech today, after two children were killed in yet another railway accident, is a fitting cameo. Our stations are only fit for period films set before WWII. The Great Indian Railway has lost its romance as it struggles for survival in inadequate hands.

(771  words)

February 26^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee