Container half full

Laloo Prasad Yadav is one politician guaranteed to get satirical press on reforms. Yet the fact is he has treated the railways rather better than he has treated Bihar. Allowing private firms into container transportation, thus ending the monopoly of the Container Corporation of India, is not a small change, given how shocking many rail ministry babus will find this departure from socialist orthodoxy. Equally important, the announcement of the policy means Laloo has kept a budget promise. Indeed, Laloo has never quite been intrinsically hostile to reforms in the railways. Rather, he has always thought reforms are not the way to good publicity, silly stunts are the better option.

Of course, one can say that the minister has never questioned the basic railways distortion: the cross subsidisation of passenger fares by freight rates. But then, no one else has either, not even the man who beat Laloo in Bihar, Nitish Kumar — by all accounts the most reformist rail minister we have had in recent times. The point is that any fair assessment of the railways under Laloo will have to keep in mind the scary anticipation with which his appointment was greeted. He hasn’t turned the railways into a Bihar-on-wheels, and he deserves some credit for that.

As for the question of reforming the railways fundamentally, the prescriptions — corporatisation, separation of core and non-core functions, an independent tariff regulator — are as familiar as the political way to implement them seems elusive. Actually, it is really beyond any rail minister to reform the railways completely. That’s a big job that has to be started by the big man: only in a government where the prime minister is politically confident of taking on many lobbies and talking along many colleagues, can radical rail reform begin. The rail minister can then be the pointman. In this government, Manmohan Singh has as little choice as Laloo Yadav when it comes to transforming the railways. Laloo, however, had the choice of doing much less for the railways. The PM should be relieved that he didn’t exercise that option.