It is reasonable to assume that Rail Bhavan, headquarters of the railway ministry, has not had the privilege of receiving full-scale attention and care of a Cabinet minister for at least the past three months. Mamata Banerjee presented her second Railway Budget as a minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government in the third week of February. Soon after that, she headed for West Bengal to unleash an electoral assault that eventually ended the Left Front’s rule in that state.
She did come back to Rail Bhavan in early March to complete the formalities necessary to get Parliament’s approval of the Railway Budget, but that was only for a couple of days. Once the Railway Budget received Parliament’s assent, she was back in West Bengal for the Assembly election campaign. The Assembly election results were out on May 13 and a week later, Ms Banerjee quit the UPA government, severed her links with Rail Bhavan and took oath as West Bengal’s first woman chief minister.
The point is, in these three months, Rail Bhavan hardly felt the absence of its railway minister. You could argue that Ms Banerjee was keeping a close watch on the affairs of the Indian Railways even as she remained physically away from Rail Bhavan, immersed in her election campaign. However, if the Indian Railways could function without the close supervision of its railway minister for over 12 weeks, serious questions are likely to arise on the prevailing structure of ministerial governance and the need for, or relevance of, such ministerial supervision.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh answered these questions in his own inimitable way. He took upon himself the Cabinet-level responsibility for looking after the railway ministry and brought in an additional minister of state for the railways from Ms Banerjee’s political party. The message was too obvious for anyone to miss: If the railway ministry could do without the full-scale services of a Cabinet minister for three months, the same arrangement could continue for some more weeks until the prime minister decided to reshuffle his council of ministers.
There was another – and more subtle – message. By not filling the Cabinet-level vacancy in Rail Bhavan, Dr Singh may well have re-ignited the debate over whether the responsibility of looking after the Indian Railways could vest instead with a minister of state. The debate could not have surfaced at a more opportune moment. The prime minister is toying with the idea of a Cabinet reshuffle either in June or just before the forthcoming monsoon session of Parliament. There are a few crucial vacancies in the Cabinet, caused by the departure of two ministers representing the UPA’s two partners.
Dr Singh lost A Raja of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), who was the minister of communications, to the 2G spectrum scandal. Since Mr Raja’s removal, the prime minister has transferred the communications ministry to Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal as his additional responsibility. In the forthcoming Cabinet reshuffle, Mr Sibal may have to give up one of his two ministries. It is likely that the prime minister may ask him to retain the communications ministry and the human resources development ministry may go to a new minister.
The big change is in the equation between the Congress and the DMK. The Congress is in a far stronger position in the alliance, particularly compared to the DMK after its disastrous performance in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. Thus, in the forthcoming Cabinet reshuffle, the prime minister should be in a rare advantageous position of allocating any relatively insignificant ministerial slot to a DMK candidate, in lieu of Mr Raja. In the current situation, the DMK is likely to limit its protestations only to minor statements without rocking the alliance.
This will give Dr Singh the necessary headroom for allotting a nominee of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress a Cabinet berth other than the railway ministry. Not having a Cabinet minister for the railway ministry will kill many birds with one stone. It will deny Ms Banerjee’s party an opportunity to continue exploiting the Indian Railways and announcing populist schemes for political gains.
More importantly, it will give the government an opportunity to dispense with the need for continuing with the annual ritual of presenting a Railway Budget in Parliament. There is no need for the Indian Railways to present its annual accounts and programmes in a separate Budget before the Lok Sabha. The Union Budget can include the key financial numbers and the programmes for the Indian Railways, as it does for the Department of Posts and many other government departments.
The benefits will be numerous. Prospects of the Indian Railways operating on sound commercial principles with greater autonomy will be brighter. The social costs it incurs would then become more transparent and the government would be able to target such schemes to benefit only the economically underprivileged passengers. Most importantly, of course, we will not have to suffer the trauma of a minister reading out in Parliament a seemingly endless list of new trains and services that the Indian Railways hopes to launch!
