The Hindu Business Line : Mamata’s track record

Breaking away from the Congress, forming her own Trinamool Congress, becoming a part of the Vajpayee-led government in 1999 as the Minister for Railways, and now coming back with the same portfolio, this time with the UPA, Ms Mamata Banerjee has indeed come a full circle!

To her surprise, she may find that things have not changed much in Rail Bhavan, except for the new Board Members! True, there are now 17 railway zones, against the nine she had to deal with; the freight target is at 875 million tonnes, almost double what she had reached; and hundreds of new Jan Shatabdis, Sampark Krantis, Garib Raths and other super-fast trains are crowding the already limited track capacity, drastically slowing down the freight trains.

She may also find the same massive backlog of hundreds of projects in the pipeline, which would take a couple of decades to complete at the current level of funding; Mr Lalu Prasad did his bit by adding seven new production units, of which no less than five are to come up in Bihar, costing nearly Rs 10,000 crore.

Financing the DFC (Dedicated Freight Corridor), a monster of a project costing over Rs 50,000 crore, which promises to provide a quantum jump to the Railway’s freight carrying capability, will be a major challenge. However, if her track record is any indication, she hopes to achieve this without much effort

A balancing act

With an eye on early Assembly polls in West Bengal, she may have announced a Rs 20 season ticket for the economically weaker sections of society such as vendors, hawkers, labourers, most of whom travel by suburban services in Kolkata, yet she knows when to draw the line.

What took years of fiscal discipline coupled with a pragmatic approach to investment decisions committing scarce resources to building up a mammoth organisation, was in just seven years turned into a basket case by the combined efforts of the Jaffer Sharief and Ram Vilas Paswan duo!

From just 35 new line projects, requiring Rs 1,080 crore to be completed in 1989-90, the list had grown to 81 in 2000-01. Within a few weeks of taking over the reins at Rail Bhavan, Ms Mamata Banerjee realised that being the Minister in charge of the 1.7-million strong behemoth was not going to be a bed of roses.

In her budget speech of February 2001, by choosing to announce that she did not propose any new lines, gauge conversion or electrification projects, she made it clear that she had no intention of adding to the financial woes of the Railways which already had a backlog of Rs 35,000-crore worth projects awaiting completion.

Further, in spite of support from the general exchequer stagnating at Rs 3,540 crore she did not hesitate to allocate funds, Rs 11,090 crore to be exact, a good 11 per cent over the last year, to expedite the ongoing projects.

Opening up rail sector

In her previous ‘avatar’, Ms Mamata systematically clamped down on all forms of wasteful expenditure, by which she hoped to achieve her target of saving Rs 750 crore in 2000-01. For Ms Mamata believes that every paisa counts, even if the annual budget happens to be in the region of Rs 50,000 crore.

Perhaps, one of her most significant contributions during her short tenure was opening up rail transport to private players. Ms Mamata helped create the first-ever joint venture between the Railways and the private sector — PRCL (Pipavav Railway Corporation Ltd).

With this, Gujarat Pipavav Port Ltd, part of the Sea King group, came into being, which aggressively pushed for a piece of the export-import pie, converting the 275-km metre gauge line connecting Pipavav near Bhavnagar with Surendarnagar of Western Railway in the Saurashtra region.

Subsequently, PRCL was able to run double-stack container trains on the non-electrified route of Jaipur-Surendarnagar-Pipavav, giving it substantial scales of economy and productivity, launching an era of phenomenal growth for Pipavav, Bhuj and other ports of Gujarat.

(The author is former Member — Mechanical, Railway Board.)