The Hindu Business Line : Many facets of Mamata

New Delhi, May 23 Honest, usually decisive, impatient, maverick, accessible. But not available in Delhi most of the time because she favoured her home-state West Bengal. This is how several Railway Ministry officials who had worked with Ms Mamata Banerjee during her 18-month stint as Railway Minister in between 1999 and 2001 describe her.

“She was transparent in her dealings. So many times she was not scared of taking decisions,” said all of them.

“At times, when she realised that decisions were not being taken and files were going back and forth between Departments, she formed a taskforce and insisted that a decision be taken soon. This is what she did to start some public private partnership projects like Pipavav Rail,” said an official.

But there was a problem: a short attention span. “If there was some complex Parliament question and we took time explaining to her the replies, she would ask her Minister of State to deal with it,” said another official.

She favoured West Bengal in her decisions, so much so that she is learnt to have insisted on increasing the wagon and locomotive procurement to help the production units in the State. “But then, isn’t this is something most of the Ministers (including Lalu Prasad did),” asked an official.

“She was accessible, warm and open to new ideas. But usually not available in the Ministry,” said many officials.

She stayed in her MP’s flat during her stint instead of moving into a larger bungalow, used a Fiat car to come to the Ministry, gave a hard time to Railway officials in Lucknow insisting that she would not take an official vehicle.

“A story in the Ministry goes that a peon was at loss when she took out Rs 5 from her purse and asked him to get a tea for a visiting MP,” said an official.

Populist Budgets

She presented two populist Budgets in 2000 and 2001, and did not increase passenger fares in either of the Budget.

But now, she is coming at a difficult time, when the Railways will have high costs (Sixth Pay Commission impact) at one end and a slowdown in revenue growth (due to general economic slowdown) on the other.

Nevertheless, West Bengal is heading for Assembly elections in 2011. And she appears to have set the tone today by saying her priority in the Ministry would be to provide “economic freedom” to the marginalised sections of the society to travel by rail and take up modernisation with “a human face”. She said her Ministry would contemplate providing monthly travel passes for unorganised labour, vendors, domestic workers and landless labourers besides students at a nominal cost and the technicalities would be worked out later.

“For the Railways, she may be a better Minister than Mr Lalu Prasad,” said an official who has worked with both of them and also with Mr Nitish Kumar.

Journalist Mr Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who describes her as “maverick” said, “Once while interviewing her, I asked her a difficult question and she started accusing me of being the Left’s agent.”