Ball set rolling on railway restructuring

The railway ministry took its biggest step on self-introspection ever by forming a committee on Monday to restructure the cash-strapped transport behemoth. The seven-member committee, with a term of one-year, will be chaired by renowned economist Dr Bibek Debroy and will have among its members former cabinet secretary KM Chandrashekar.

Other members of the committee are Gurcharan Das, former chairman and managing director of Procter and Gamble, professor Partha Mukhopadhyay, senior fellow of the Centre for Policy Research, Ravi Narain, former managing director of the National Stock Exchange, Rajendra Kashyap, former financial commissioner of the railways and one as-yet-unnamed nominee of the department of economic affairs.

Sanjay Chadha, currently serving as the executive director mechanical engineering of the Railway Board will be the secretary to the committee, the ministry's circular states.

The onus of the committee would be ' reorganizing and restructuring the Railway Board and subsequently the department so that policy making and operations are separated, the department does not work in silos, policy making focuses on long-term and medium-term planning issues and operations focuses on day-to-day functioning of the organization.'

The other important aspects for the committee would be to work out ways to 'promote exchange of officers between the railways and other departments.' In a bid to boost the balances of a railway system that ends up spending almost 94 per cent of what it earns, the committee will have to estimate financial needs of the railways and ensure policies to raise resources from within and outside the government.

The committee has also been tasked with giving recommendations on the existing Rail Tariff Authority, the circular states. The committee would be headquartered at New Delhi and the Infrastructure Directorate of the Railway Board would be the nodal body that will coordinate the working of the committee.

The committee comes on the back of railway minister V Sadananda Gowda's July 8 railway budget speech where he laid out one of the most depressing assessment of railway accounts in recent times. The Railways, Gowda told Parliament, earned Rs1,39, 558 crore, of which it spent Rs1,30,321 crore as working expenses in the financial year 2013-14. The bleeding is compounded by the fact that thanks to low fares for the past few years, loss per kilometre per passenger has increased from 10 paise in 2000-01 to 23 paise in 2012-13.

Mega railway dreams like the Diamond Quadrilateral Network- to connect metros with high-speed trains- and the 350kmph bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad will require the kind of money the railways just cannot imagine, The Diamond Quadrilateral would require Rs 9 lakh crore, while the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train would require Rs 60,000 crore at current prices. Add to that another Rs 5 lakh crore over the next 10 years just to complete ongoing projects.

In a railway system where safety isn't anything to write home about, the railways will be needing Rs40000 crores for track renewals, elimination of unmanned level crossings, building road-overbridges and road-underbridges.