Come Budget season, newspapers are full of stories about how Railway finances are in dire straits. They say: Fares have not been raised for a decade, fuel prices are rising continuously, salaries and pension payouts have soared, and all the while traffic is declining and, of course, losses are mounting.
Causing even more concern are incessant reports of loss of human lives and injuries due to collisions, derailments, bus-rail collision at road crossings and commuters hit by speeding suburban trains.
Dr Anil Kakodkar, former Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, who was asked to study safety and security in the Railways, has submitted a 160-page report listing the ills, and suggesting a massive investment of Rs 100,000 crore for remedying these alone.
In a stinging indictment of the Railways, he says those using the Railways are “trusting their luck” more than anything else. Another point he cites is poor maintenance of both track and rolling stock. It seems just the other day when Lalu Prasad Yadav, the then Minister for Railways, lectured Harvard students as to how he achieved a turnaround by raising the axle loading overnight.
That this abysmal state of affairs is in no small measure due to decision-making by populist, or absentee, ministers occupying the chair in the Rail Bhavan is incontrovertible. However, it is doubtful if such populism has really brought the parties they belong to any significant electoral dividends.
Blurred line
The line that delineates the division of responsibility in the government between the political master and the permanent techno-manager or the bureaucrat, has always been blurred.
It is done deliberately so that both can escape accountability while the minister can claim credit in case things turn out better, fortuitously or otherwise. Even in the telecom scandal, though both the bureaucrat and the cabinet minister face charges, it remains to be seen how the courts will apportion responsibility and blame among them, if it does.
Unlike Indian telecom, Railways has, all along, been managed at the top by in-house technocrats, highly qualified and experienced. Surely, it should fall within their remit to be held accountable for the efficient management of the Railways.
Additionally, Indian Railways, as a specialised techno-commercial system, should be a lot more amenable to establishing codified practices, as to when and how various inputs and price structure should be changed to get the performance, including financial, within a reasonable bandwidth of efficiency year after year.
If the Finance Ministry can attempt a Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act for the entire government , should it be difficult for a self-contained and compact system such as the Railways to do something similar?
Until techno-managers take full responsibility to give us efficient management, it seems there is no hope for the Railways to reform itself on a durable basis. That is not likely under a structure modelled on civil services.
A decade ago, Rakesh Mohan, an eminent economist and former Deputy Governor, RBI, in an exhaustive report on Indian Railways, observed that the contours of policy, regulatory and management functions of the railways are fuzzy.
He also said that Indian Railways is perhaps the most studied institution in this planet. Perhaps, now, it is time to ask some eminent political economists why Railways remains static, despite so many study reports.
The author is former member, Ordnance Factories