The Hindu Business Line : Will new driver put railways on right track?

THE BJP's gambleto advance general elections, hoping to cash in on the resounding wins in Gujarat, followed by Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh, went wrong. It not only ended worse off than the most pessimistic forecast made by many poll pundits; but also gave the much-needed shot in the arm for the Congress party, which was fighting with its back to the wall after the last State Assembly polls.

The dollops of populist measures, announced by the former Railway Minister, Mr Nitish Kumar, in the interim Budget, hardly made any contribution to swaying voters who, perhaps, had had enough of the India Shining campaign, which had never reached the millions of poor in the vitally important rural areas.

The seven new zones which will cost the Railways dearly in terms of hiked expenditure on overheads, did not yield the benefits Mr Nitish Kumar hoped for.

Not only did the previous governments spend a whopping Rs 50 crore on the `India Shining' campaign, it burdened the Railways with an annual expenditure of about the same order in the form of higher passenger and freight tariffs.

Perhaps, the greatest damage done by Mr Nitish Kumar to the economic and industrial life-line is in obliterating any semblance of innovation which the Railway's 1.6 million workforce had.

Decisions were routinely made by a Nitish Kumar coterie forever looking for gimmicks to boost the Railways performance instead of opting for basic inputs.

`Suraksha Kavach', a GPS-based sophisticated and expensive computer-aided collision prevention system, was being pushed by Mr Nitish Kumar against all sane advice, to be adopted on the North Frontier Railway on a trial basis and, ultimately, on the entire 64,000-km network at a whopping Rs 1,500 core.

Mercifully, over the last six months, the vendor had got himself tied up in knots over finalising the performance and manufacturing specifications, a must for any clearance by the Railway Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) — Railway's R&D arm at Lucknow. Now, with Mr Nitish Kumar's exit, it can be given a quiet burial.

However, the new Minister for Railways will have a very long list of promises to fulfill, which Mr Nitish Kumar made at the mini-Budget he presented in February.

No less than Rs 37,000 crore was pledged by the then Finance Minster, actively supported by the Prime Minister, for organising inputs — about Rs 17,000 under the National Rail Vikas Yojana charged for completing pending works, and Rs 20,000 for the last of his brain-child , the Remote Area Rail Sampark Yojana.

In line with the much-touted former Prime Minister's initiative to provide connectivity to remote areas through the NHAI, the project will not only take years to materialise but also need funding., With the much-hyped disinvestment bonanaza now in jeopardy,undoubtedly, increasing passenger and freight tariffs may be the only option to make good Mr Nitish Kumar's promises.

Creditably, Mr Nitish Kumar at the beginning of his first stint as Minster of Railways had brought out in a "White Paper on Railway Projects", placed in the Lok Sabha in July 1998, the burden of the backlog of projects he had inherited .

He had also sought to involve the MPs in a detailed discussion on the Railways' future by bringing out a "Status Paper on Indian Railways: Some issues and options" in May 1998, which was re-presented in the Lok Sabha in May 2002.

However, the people's representatives were in no mood to read even the slim 50-page report, leave alone discuss its contents.

They simply wanted their own share of goodies, starting with small ones such as new trains, stoppage of super-fast trains at their home towns, extending the runs, improving catering contracts at stations and on-board prestige trains — Rajdhanis — on to mega projects for gauge conversion, new lines, electrification and bridges.

The last decade, starting with the inimitable Mr Jaffer Sharief and ending with Mr Nitish Kumar, has been a costly one for the Railways, which is struggling to remain out of the red without resorting to a steep hike in passenger and freight fares.

Market borrowings are already extracting their pound of flesh and with the funding promised by the erstwhile government not flowing in, the new incumbent has to struggle to make ends meet.

However, all is not lost and, hopefully, the new Railways Minister will take stock of the inherent strengths of this vast behemoth of a 1.7-million workforce, capable of rising to the occasion.

Greater involvement of the private sector, not only in making and supplying the vitally-needed rolling stock, track, signals and telecom equipment, but also in accelerating the pace of indigenisation, could yield major dividends.

New initiatives in servicing ports, particularly in the West, such as Pipavav and Mundra, by running double-decker container trains could boost transport productivity and yield economies of scale for the vital export traffic.

Concor has touched 1.7 million TEUs of container carried last year and is the best bet for the Railways to capture some high-value traffic, which it has been steadily losing to roads over the last four decades, by insisting on running block, point-to-point loads, mostly for bulk traffic.

Undoubtedly, the five-year stint of Madhav Rao Scindia was and will remain a benchmarkfor years to come. It was the golden era when the Railways touched new peaks of efficiency, and ventured into new areas of passenger services.

One was the Computerised Reservation System (CRS), which has grown into perhaps the world's largest such system with over 700,000 tickets being sold every day.

TheShatabdi set of trains, connecting major cities and giving the passenger fast intercity travel with on-board catering, was also Madhava Rao Scindia's brain-child.

(The author is a former Member — Mechanical — Railway Board)