Bengal, NE, Kerala main beneficiaries, with Congress partnership on track
Railway minister Mamata Banerjee’s budget speech was consistently obstructed by Janata Dal (United) MPs who wanted to know the fate of ongoing projects, leaving her irritable.
If this was not enough, immediately after she ended her speech, she was surrounded by a crowd, each wanting to know why their state or constituency had been overlooked.
Significantly, it was not Banerjee’s party colleagues who came to her rescue from the combined onslaught. Congress president Sonia Gandhi stood by Banerjee’s side and defended her stoutly. When Congress MP Raj Babbar tried to remonstrate with the minister, the Congress chief told him: “Pehle unki baat to sun lijiye.”
While Bannerjee’s largesse towards West Bengal was expected, it was this visible and public closeness between the leaders of the two parties, just months before the West Bengal assembly elections, that caused political antennae to go up. The Congress and Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress are going to contest jointly, though a section of the Congress is deeply unhappy about this.
In the rail budget – praised by the Prime Minister as a common man’s one – West Bengal got a lot, mostly job generating projects. Such as a new suburban rail network system for Kolkata, among other Indian cities; a track machining industry in Uluberia; a metro coach factory near Singur; one new passenger terminal for West Bengal; a rail industrial park in Nandigram and a new railway software centre in Darjeeling. A new train service was announced to Dhaka, Bangladesh, from Agartala. A survey will begin to connect Sealdah and Howrah stations. Farakka will be among six centres to get a water bottling plant.
The minister also said one member from any family which had lost land for rail projects would be given employment by the railways.
NE, Kerala benefit
What was interesting was the way Banerjee tried to reach out to the northeast, possibly buoyed by the recent assembly seat victory in Manipur and last year’s five-seat haul in Arunachal Pradesh. She announced all the northeastern state capitals, except Gangtok in Sikkim, would be connected by the rail network in the next seven years. The railways will work out a masterplan for this purpose, she said. A diesel locomotive centre will be set up in Manipur. Rail industrial parks at Jellingham and New Bongaigaon have also been proposed.
And, even if she was not going to be a beneficiary from this exercise, Banerjee lavished attention on Kerala, another state due to go to polls later this year, where the ruling CPI(M) is in trouble. Kerala will have 12 new trains that touch the state, two new passenger terminals and one wagon factory (also announced last year, but did not take off). Five stations are to be upgraded as Adarsh ones. The Thiruvanthapuram station has been included in a proposed tourism-related project under a public-private partnership.