#dnaEdit: Suresh Prabhu’s prudence sans sales pitch

The Minister for Railways Suresh Prabhu, said more or less the same things and promised more or less the same budget, following in the footsteps of his predecessors in the last 15 years. Compared to many among them, Prabhu enjoys high credibility and the expectation is that he will follow up on the implementation of the many promises he has made. It was difficult for the Railways Minister to have come up with radically new budgetary provisions. Hence his honest confession was: “We cannot deliver overnight”. Prabhu’s expression of intent to improve cleanliness on trains as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist Clean India move, or his promise to tap both domestic and multilateral financial agencies to fund projects, are par for the course and nothing more.  

The tenor of Prabhu’s speech, which was delivered with a lightness of touch and no histrionics, showed the Modi flavour of easy-to-digest power-point capsules: four goals, five drivers and 11 thrust areas. It is gimmicky enough but the minister carried it off without provoking sniggers from the Opposition benches. He did not try to capitalise on the populist “no increase in passenger fares”. He announced it in a matter-of-fact tone and focused on the more serious questions. 

What marks out the 2015-16 Rail Budget is the fact that he has pinpointed the real challenge facing the railways. The Union Minister said that the railways were burdened with “under-investment” and “over-utilisation”. The problem could not have been stated more succinctly. The question is whether he can marshal adequate investments for the railways. He has hinted at how he wants to go about it: tapping the pension funds and multilateral agencies are among the other strategies for raising funds. He has also assured that the railway assets will be leveraged and ‘monetised’; that they will not be sold. 

Prabhu was prudent in making it clear that he would want to improve the efficiency of running the railways and not wait for the big changes to happen. He said that some of the existing tracks will be used to increase the speed of the trains on some of the sections. Here is an attempt to make the best use of existing capacity while working for a long-term improvement. The railways are indeed in need of drastic changes. The existing system cannot run as it does now; neither can it survive by tinkering here and tweaking there — which is what Prabhu seems to have done on Thursday. The railways is a challenge to the imagination of the administration as well as the entrepreneur. The government is not yet ready to be imaginative and innovative, nor is the private sector ready to grasp the opportunity the railways offer. 

The experts who had been demanding the so-called big ticket reforms are disappointed with Prabhu’s budget because concessions have not been offered to the private sector. It is not that the minister and the government would not want to bring about dramatic changes. But there is recognition that the investment climate is not as solid as some dreamy-eyed commentators make it out to be. The interesting question is whether the no-nonsense, sober approach adopted by Prabhu in the railway budget is a precursor to the general budget that finance minister Arun Jaitley will present on Saturday. It is most likely that Jaitley’s budget will carry the same businesslike and moderate tone as that of the Rail Budget.  It can also be argued that the Modi government has abandoned rhetoric and flamboyant gestures in the wake of the disastrous performance of the BJP in the Delhi assembly elections earlier this month.