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Business News/ Opinion / Railways: only giant reforms will do
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Railways: only giant reforms will do

Suresh Prabhu should recognize that the sole constituency he has to satisfy is the future of Indian Railways and no other

Photo: Mint Premium
Photo: Mint

While there is tremendous anticipation for the next Union budget, the conversation on railway budget is relatively muted. By the time newspapers will be flush with opinion pieces on railways, the bureaucrats at Rail Bhawan will be giving final touches to the year’s budget.

The prime minister has already announced that the next Union budget will be full of new ideas with measurable deliverables. Likewise, the rail budget too should talk of ideas and not present a laundry list of announcements.

The expected surge in growth and its heterogeneous spatial distribution will trigger massive internal migration of men and material. Railways has the opportunity to shape and facilitate such migration, in the process becoming a tool for growth itself.

To start, the forthcoming rail budget needs to identify the problems and take giant steps—nothing less will do—towards reversing the widely documented decline of the railway sector.

The first and topmost concern with railways is the institutional disregard for certain factors that go into the making of the technology-intensive industry that it is.

Take research and development (R&D) for instance. There is a near-complete absence of a research ecosystem. Research, Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) which serves as a technical advisor and consultant to the Indian Railways hardly has any permanent cadre of scientists and officers to carry out cutting edge R&D work.

Think about safety. A high level safety review committee (2012) chaired by Anil Kakodkar records the growing number of casualties even as the number of consequential train accidents is going down owing to increased severity of the accidents.The institutional disregard for the concept of safety is quite evident as accidents of minor nature, near misses, and casualties due to trespassing of railway tracks are not even recorded.

The second concern with the railways has been the slow pace of technology adoption. The coaches traditionally made on Integral Coach Factory (ICF) design are not safe at increasing speeds. These coaches have to be replaced by Link Hoffman Busch (LHB) design coaches. The speed of replacement leaves a lot to be desired. The story repeats itself whether one talks of electrification of railway lines or adoption of new signalling systems.

The third bottleneck, and one of the greatest to any systemic enhancement, is the organizational structure of Indian Railways. The Railway Board performs the three-in-one role of policy framer, operator and regulator at the same time. The management is top heavy— zonal railways and divisional railways are not empowered enough to use funds and assets available to them in the manner they think appropriate. A high level railway restructuring committee chaired by Bibek Debroy is closely looking at this issue (Full disclosure: I am currently assisting Partha Mukhopadhyay who is a member of this committee).

The fourth and most well-known impediment in better performance output of railways is political interference. In order to satisfy various constituencies, railway ministers kept introducing new trains and coaches without commensurate upgrade of back-end infrastructure. Between 1993 and 2011, the wholesale price index rose by 295% and the fares of sleeper class and second class travel rose just by 144% and 106% respectively. The encroachment of railway property—not an uncommon sight—has not been adequately dealt with, apprehending political backlash. Railway has been viewed as an instrument to square the circle of patron-client relationship of Indian politics.

Suresh Prabhu, the new railway minister, has till now made all the right noises. Let us hope that he recognizes the sole constituency he has to satisfy is the future of Indian Railways and no other.

Kunal Singh is a research associate at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.

Comments are welcome at otherviews@livemint.com

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Published: 26 Jan 2015, 06:51 PM IST
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