The Hindu Business Line : A case of misplaced exuberance

To get a true measure of the Railway Budget, just savour the gargantuan nature of Mr Lalu Prasad’s charge: 20 lakh employees; 1,08,706 km of track; 2,22,147 wagons, 42,570 coaches and 7,739 locomotives; 14,444 trains transporting daily the equivalent of Australia’s population; moving two million tonnes of freight daily.

Mr Lalu, thus, stands out as one who has performed the near-miracle of breathing new life into the giant of a Ministry and affixing on it the stamp of his own personality.

Record profit

In the history of the Indian Railways in all the years after Independence, the only Railway Minister who outshines him (as also his predecessors and successors) is Lal Bahadur Shastri, not in terms of size and scale of operations perhaps, but in his hitherto unsurpassed moral stature.

Mr Lalu has obviously been carried away by the hallelujahs sung for his own heroic helmsmanship of the railways and the record profit of Rs 25,000 crore earned by the behemoth of an organisation with few parallels anywhere in the world. He has showered, literally with gay abandon, bonanzas on all sections of rail users, beginning from coolies to the well-heeled travelling in Air Conditioned First Class.

No doubt, some among those benefiting from his benevolence — especially, senior citizens of both sexes, AIDS patients, girl students — deserve it and there is no need to be churlish or grudging on that score. Freight concession to North Eastern States is a particularly imaginative measure which is timely and welcome.

Fare reduction

The real question is about the wisdom of reducing fares across the board and the introduction of 53 new trains and 10 Garib Raths. The sense of priorities shown by Mr Lalu somehow seems skewed.

There was no crying demand for bringing the fares down, certainly not from those who travelled AC First, AC Sleeper or AC Chair Car.

They would not have minded if Mr Lalu had maintained the status quo, for they choose the higher classes of their own volition, only after making sure that they can afford it. The fare reduction of those classes are not also such as to attract significantly more passengers. Similarly, the tinkering with freight reduction too will have only a marginal effect on prices, if at all.

Traffic congestion

There is no specific assurance in the Budget speech that so many new trains will not cause serious traffic congestion and affect the quality and regularity of track maintenance and that they will not compromise safety considerations.

New passenger trains also eat into the time and space for movement of good trains which are not only the chief bread-winners of the system but also keep the sinews of the economy strong.

Any operational decision that slows them down will have a cascading effect in the sense of pulling down the volume and velocity of transactions in all sectors.

For these reasons, the Traffic wing of the Railway Board had always been opposed to excessive number of new passenger trains trotted out by Railway Ministers eager for rounds of applause.

Transient plaudits

Instead of falling for all these familiar traps, Mr Lalu would have done well to find purposeful use for the enormous amount of profit in the form of adding to infrastructure, improving passenger amenities, building under- or over-passes at level crossings, adding to the production of locomotives, coaches and wagons by raising the capacity of existing factories or erecting new ones, expanding railway stations and yards where needed, and buttressing the quality of maintenance.

Indeed, a five-year rolling plan covering all these and other equally relevant aspects of infrastructural development would have been a far-sighted way of giving a big push to the future healthy expansion of the railways, in tune with the demands from a burgeoning population and growing economy.

From this perspective, the current year’s Railway Budget is a great opportunity missed for the sake of transient plaudits for populist gimmicks.

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