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The annual railway budget speech has become an exercise for ministers to burnish their political image and dress themselves up as pro-people, at the cost of the institution they head. The Economic Survey and the Union Budget speech are important events in the economic calendar of the country. The latter is to India what its president’s State of the Union address is to the United States. Through association with these events, the railway budget speech gets its share of public glare, which it would not otherwise have. Two days before the Union Budget, for two hours past noon, the nation is a captive audience to the railway minister. It is their day under the sun.
Even responsible ministers have to make placatory announcements, yielding to the burden of expectations and pressure from lawmakers from their own and other parties. If they do not oblige they are accused of being elitist and uncaring.
They can, of course, make anxious statements about the poor financial health of the railways and the necessity of conserving resources for investment in projects, that are not only profitable but also serve the economy by moving goods and people at lower cost over long distances. Dinesh Trivedi of the Trinamool Congress chose the latter course on 14 March 2012.
It was a choice, party leader Mamata Banerjee disapproved of. She got the party’s official spokesperson to denounce him in TV debates that followed. Trivedi was forced to quit even before the budget came up for discussion and voting in Parliament.
As railway minister, Banerjee herself followed the precedent set by most of her predecessors. Not that she needed a template for populism. Just as Tata Steel once advertised, ‘We also make steel,’ the business of freight haulage was peripheral to her vision. Here are excerpts from her 3 July 2009 speech:
Banerjee saw the railways as a state within a state. She allowed it to spill all over. Among her many announcements were six nursing colleges to be set up on railway land, indoor stadia, medical colleges and the revival of printing presses.
Despite the attention, railway budget speeches do not ensure accountability to Parliament. In his 2008 speech, Lalu Prasad declared that toilets in all 36,000 coaches would go green and there would be no discharge of untreated faecal matter by 2012. But in February 2015, Suresh Prabhu announced that only 17,388 toilets had been converted.
The same is the case with accounting reforms. They will be work-in-progress eternally if left to railway mandarins.
In ‘Bankruptcy to Billions’, a book about the turnaround of the railways during the tenure of Lalu Prasad, his Officer on Special Duty and author, Sudhir Kumar, says only 20 percent of the total capital investment of the railways have political implications and the rest can be apolitically made. Kumar says he got a free hand to play around with freight rates – charging a higher rate on iron ore for exports, which was hugely in demand from China, or carrying higher axle loads, so long as he respected the political mandate of no privatisation, no retrenchment and no sleeper class fare hike.
Prasad wanted an image makeover, after a disastrous run as Chief Minister of Bihar.
But merely doing away with the annual budget speech will not help. Without whatever little scrutiny there is, the Railway Board might become more unaccountable than it already is. Most of the board members just care about turf and preserving the monopoly of the railways. They do not realise that the monopoly also creates an obligation: to provide low-cost locomotion to the economy and efficient, high-speed passengers services at competitive fares.
The railways will have to be restructured into a truly commercial enterprise, with social obligations paid for from the general budget. Concurrently, the annual speech should be abolished. Suresh Prabhu’s last two railway budget speeches have been sober. He should deny future minsters an opportunity to yield to the temptation of grandstanding.
(Vivian Fernandes is editor of www.smartindianagriculture.in but takes a keen interest in matters of railways)
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