Email
Print
ShareIt was Mamata Banerjee's day in the sun and she has carried it off creditably enough. She laced it with populist rhetoric, declaring that it was not economic viability but social needs should be the determining factor for increasing the number of trains and the number of stops. But she did not indulge in any major giveaways.
Banerjee, like her populist predecessor Lalu Prasad Yadav, made her general point about the railways being a people-oriented service -- which it is with millions of people dependent on it for mobility -- but she has taken care that economic viability remains a key component of its objectives. The freight charges have not been hiked but the freight revenue is set to grow by a modest 5 per cent at a time when economic activity has slowed down considerably.
There are two important innovations in Banerjee's railway plan. The first is to provide medical help on long distance trains. Not many are aware that the railways have an enviable medical network in the same way that the armed forces have. She has begun a process of putting that to better use. The second is to allow private sector participation in maintaining the freight hubs. This is a good beginning. It will not be necessary to privatise the railways as market zealots often insist, but it could turn out to be efficient and profitable if the private sector is allowed to participate in the vast network of operations in a gradual fashion and in different ways though this will have to be thought through.
The railways are doing well, whether through happenstance and growing demand or because of well-laid-out plans. But that just is not enough. There is need for a more efficient and expanded railway network in the country and the speed at which it is growing is not keeping pace with the growing demands of the people and the economy. That would require more than well-intended populism of the Yadav and Banerjee kind and the bureaucratic ingenuity of the Indian Railways Service personnel. What is required a bold leap into the future. Now that this budget is done, Bannerjee will have to seriously start thinking of taking the railways into the 21st century.
The importance of the railways in India cannot be underestimated -- it gives mobility to millions of people in the country and has tremendous social and economic fallout. That is why, railways will have to grow much more than its plans indicate. It would be timid and complacent to be focused merely on the annual budgetary exercise. Millions of commuters experience rush hour trauma every day, not just in metropolitan centres like Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Delhi but across the country. It would need greater planning and better execution to ease the pressure; that would really help the aam aadmi in a big way.
