Populist engine to pull along reform wagon

And while there was some debate over whether this Budget had been prepared by the Minister or by PMO, critics were pleasantly surprised to see a number of schemes that addressed basic problems affecting the Railways.

As one of the biggest land-owners in the country, the Railways have decided to put their vacant land to productive use by building hotels, malls and other commercial buildings on their properties. This could become an important source of revenue generation for them in the years to come.

There was also a move to tackle the wagon shortage afflicting the Railways, as reported by The Indian Express today. Yadav announced an ‘Wagon Investment Scheme’ under which customers were invited to help pay for railway wagons. In return, they would get a guaranteed anumber of rakes every month. Not only would this ease the fiscal load on the Railways, it would also come as a relief to customers whose goods cannot move for want of wagons.

On a similar vein, Yadav also tried to encourage major freight customers like fertiliser and chemical manufacturers, to develop their own sidings where a railway wagon could arrive, load their goods and carry them away. The Railways have offered joint investments for freight commitments of 10 years or more. The private entities will pay for the cost of land, earthwork and the sub-structure of the track, while the Railways would bear the rest of the costs.

The move to cut investments by more than 6 per cent to Rs 14,648 crore in 2005-06 is double-edged. On the one hand, it improves the bottomline. The railway surplus in 2005-06 is expected to rise to Rs 1975 crore, more than twice the amount budgeted last year. On the other hand, there could be a slowdown in building new rail lines, track renewals and gauge conversion.

The Ministry had budgeted only Rs 652 crore in 2005-06 to build new lines, compared to Rs 1,631 crore in the current year.

Track renewals would also be hit as the Budget has allocated only Rs 3,409 crore during 2005-06, much lower than the revised estimate of Rs 3,835 crore for 2004-05. The Railways have also decided to scale down gauge conversion by allocating only Rs 690 crore during 2005-06, compared to Rs 1,067 crore estimated for this fiscal.

The populism surfaces elsewhere:

• Unemployed youth can travel free by second-class if they are appearing for state government job interviews

• Farmers and milk producers going for training to national institutes get a 50 per cent discount. The same applies to rural girl students appearing in national level entrance examinations for professional courses

• While cutting the freight rate on kerosene and LPG, Yadav also moved to rationalise freight tariff. The Minister has proposed merging of various classes of commodities to bring them down from 4,000 to 80 slabs

• 46 new trains were announced, 27 trains had their routes extended and another 10 saw their frequency being increased

The Minister who flaunts his rustic image also embraced technology—including Internet booking. The Railway Inquiry facility on number 139 will be extended across the country. Wait-listed passengers will also know well in advance whether they will be able to secure booking on a particular train.

Although there were indications that the Railways would be nudged into sticking to their core business, it would have been too much to expectYadav to toe the line. The optical fibre network owned by RailTel, his own PSU, would venture into telecommunications in a big way and offer long distance and mobile services. His colleague in the Telecom Ministry, Dayanidhi Maran, did not look too pleased about this intrusion.