The Hindu Business Line : Taking the moolah track

The Railways is the ultimate milch cow and an ideal vehicle for winning friends and influencing people. With its separate annual budget of over Rs 50,000 crore not many politicians would miss the opportunity to lord over the Ministry from the well appointed corner room of Rail Bhavan.

Starting in the early 1970s with the indomitable L. N. Mishraevery Railway Minister — with a few worthy exceptions such as Prof. Dandawate, Kedar Pandey and Madhavrao Scindia — has strived to make the Railways his personal fiefdom and used its vast resources to win friends and influence people.

New trains

Introducing new trains, especially those linking their constituencies, is one temptation most Railway Ministers cannot resist. Kamlapathi Tripathi started the trend —, Varanasi came to be connected to all the major metros by express trains.

The suave Madhavrao Scindia could not resist the temptation either and introduced the first of the fast inter-city services — Shatabdis — from Delhi to Gwalior, which would ultimately end up at Bhopal.

Nitish Kumar hit upon the idea of introducing an entirely new service in the form of the Jan Shatabdi, a no-frills fast intercity train with all second-class chair car, air-conditioned and general. In another initiative, modelled on the Rajdhanis, he introduced the Sampark Kranti, a long distance super-fast express connecting major metros.

These new trains are crowding the existing heavily worked sections, eating into scarce track capacity and slowing the all important freight carriers, the bread and butter of any rail system. But this seldom seems to deter the powers that be.

Rail administration

However, it was not the new trains route which Ram Vilas Paswan was to adopt in his quest forbuilding up his constituency. He went for something bigger — major reorganisation of the rail administrative set-up by carving out an entirely new zone at Hajipur, placing his constituency firmly on the rail map. Unfortunately his tenure was short and he had to bow out before he could give the proposal any shape.

His successor Nitish Kumar however lost no time in not only opting for Hajipur but adding another half a dozen cities for new zonal headquarters. Overnight the number of zones shot up from nine to 17, totally disrupting the command and control system of the 64,000 km network carefully built up over the years.

However, true to its tradition, the Railway management and staff got into their stride to make the most out of the new scheme of things, turning a potentially disastrous move into an opportunity to boost freight business, which Lalu Prasad was to benefit from, resulting in the much talked about turnaround story.

No electoral mileage

Not to be outdone, Lalu too brought in his own brand of initiatives. The Garib Rathushered in air-conditioned long distance travel for second-class passengers, packing 85 of them like sardines in a coach which can accommodate only 75 in a non air-conditioned version.

A couple years back, he also initiated work on half a dozen multi-crore projects, mostly in Bihar, which may not see light of the day unless funds are made available in time. The much-touted PPP (public private partnership) route for two major locomotive manufacturing units, dumped for want of suitable response, may not even take off, leaving the Railways proud owners of hundreds of acres of mostly submerged land!

Unfortunately, both Lalu and Paswan failed to get any substantial mileage from their efforts, of course at the cost of the Railways, to gain popularity with the electorate.

(The author is former Member (Mechanical), Railway Board.)