Mamata doesn’t take no for an answer

The Expanded Railway Board, which comprises officials of Finance Ministry and Planning Commission along with Railway Board members, had last week rejected new projects worth Rs 2745.86 crore which Mamata had wanted to include in the Budget. The grounds of rejection were that the projects were economically non-viable and had a negative Rate of Return (RoR).

However, sources said the Union Minister, overruling the Expanded Board’s decision, reportedly noted on the file that RoR was not everything. “Railways have a social obligation to fulfil public aspirations,” she is believed to have stated.

Mamata isn’t the first Railway Minister to have bypassed the Expanded Railway Board’s decision. In fact, the trend was set by Jaffer Sharief when the Expanded Board rejected some of his gauge-conversion projects in Karnataka, especially in his constituency Bangalore. According to sources, he stuck to his guns even after the Finance Ministry rejected the proposals, and refused to introduce the Budget until the projects were included.

Ram Vilas Paswan followed suit and also bypassed the Expanded Board’s decision to include about half-a-dozen projects including a new zone in Bihar and the Siliguri-Alipur-New Bongaigaon railway line. The projects were ultimately cleared by the Finance Ministry and also by the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs.

“Now that there are precedents, Mamata also probably feels encouraged to follow the example,” a railway board official said. And officials believe that Mamata will get away with it. “If she could threaten to resign before the last Railway Budget, when she was not even the Railway Minister, and get the West Bengal package cleared by Nitish Kumar, she can very well do it herself for her state,” the official added.

Among the projects which Mamata got sanctioned for her state last year are the Barasat-Hasnabad railway line, the electrification of Circular Railway and the extension of the Metro Railway to Garia.