Rail Budget 2013: Slow train or fast train?
The Financial Express: Feb 26 2013, 02:14 IST
Railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal surprised when, out of the blue, he announced a 10-12% hike in passenger fares, a few months after taking over when the Trinamool Congress vacated the ministry along with the government. Perhaps the UPA was, the popular view went, really serious about reforms—after all, it hiked Railway fares quite soon after it got back control of the ministry; more so, considering Dinesh Trivedi was sacked from the job by party chief Mamata Banerjee for attempting a smaller hike. Problem is, around half the hike got neutralised when, a week after the hike was announced, the UPA raised prices of bulk diesel by 27%. This then left the Railways where it has been for a long time—a tired, antiquated and unsafe organisation, creaking at the seams, unable to go any direction except backwards.
Take any Railway fund you can think of—the Depreciation Reserve Fund or the Capital Fund, for instance—and the story is the same of rapidly depleting funds, of various Railway ministers such as Mamata Banerjee just refusing to contribute to the funds in a spurious attempt to try and balance the books. The Depreciation Reserve Fund, for instance, dipped from R7,100 crore in FY09 to R4,600 crore the next year—while the FY13 Budget planned on raising this by around a third, the chances of this happening are bleak given the Railways missing its revenue targets. The Capital Fund, used for creating new revenue-generating assets, similarly, got depleted to nearly a third in FY09, got reduced
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