Railways should be completely corporatised, says J P Chowdhury of Titagarh Wagons

Is the Budget positive only on the long-term strategies like re-looking at the freight policy and the structure of Railway Board? What about the short- to medium-term strategy?

On the short-term, there is a problem of financing, which you can find out from the Budget papers. Much is dependent upon the hope of borrowing money. The minister is trying to speed up the decision making, which will have positive impact in the long term. But for how long and to what extent he would be able to succeed is very important. Last year had been a bad year for the Railways due to poor traffic growth. But the futurist vision that he has laid down, if he is able to work towards that, we hope Railways will turn into a very efficient organisation.

The problem of dwindling freight traffic has been highlighted in his speech when he talked of reversing the slide in the share of Railways in moving freight.

The shift of cargo movement from Railways to road has already happened and needs to come back to the Railways.

Do you think restructuring Railway Board would help improve the situation? The minister talked about a proposal to reorganise the Railway Board along business lines and suitably empower chairman of the Board and specific steps like setting cross functional directorates to focus on areas like non-fare revenues, motive power and information technology....

Could be. But I am an advocate of complete corporatisation of the Railways. It shouldn't be part of the government. In fact, apart from India, only few countries have a ministry dedicated to railways, except Pakistan and North Korea. But that's an altogether different topic, which needs serious debate. Restructuring is fine, but my view is something more radical, of doing away with the Board altogether. In a country like ours, we need to do things at one go and not in a piecemeal way.

Does finance remain the key problem area?

Finance is a big problem. Corporatisation would help tackle this problem to a large extent.

About specific projects, Mr Prabhu talked of an auto hub in Chennai and linking ports with Railways network. How would these projects help companies like Titagarh Wagons?

We have entered into the field of specialised wagons for transporting automobiles having own designs. These are good, but incremental steps helping, us, the Railways, the auto companies and the environment also as automobiles so far are being transported on road.

The minister talked of rationalisation of tariff structure to bring back freight to the Railways. How helpful would this step be?

Actually, tariff should be depoliticised. When tariff becomes part of budgeting, there are lot of political implications. Petrol and diesel have been depoliticised by putting into a formula and the prices change accordingly. Why can't we do the same for the railway freight?