Rediscover an 80-yr-old legacy

While the 70 lakh commuters in Mumbai are looking forward to the rail budget that will be presented to the Parliament by union minister Dinesh Trivedi on Wednesday, only a few know that the concept of having a separate rail budget is completing 80 years this year.

The budget is expected to give a push to the rail network of the city where it all begun, by announcing new corridors and promising luxury AC suburban trains.

The story of the India’s separate railway budget is equally fascinating as that of the subcontinent’s railway that today runs along 65,000km covering 7,500 stations.

Multiple companies, private lines and a scattered system — that’s how Indian Railways were in the 1920s.
As the railways grew in the sub-continent, the issue of control and management by the government started becoming a complicated task.

To study the issue and recommend a solution, the government, in 1921, appointed a 10-member panel called the East India Railway Committee.

As it was chaired by British “railway scientist” Sir William Mitchell Acworth (1850-1925), it came to be known as the Acworth Committee.

The committee recommended a unified management of the entire network and that “the railways should have a separate budget of their own and assume responsibilities of their income and expenditure”.

Historian on colonial railways in India and professor of history at the University of Manitoba Ian J Kerr describes the Acworth Committee as “one of the most influential of the many committees that inquired into railroad matters during the colonial period”.

The government accepted the report in 1924, and the railway finances were separated from the general government finances the same year, leading to an independent railway budget — a practice followed to this year.