Derail ministers

How clever is a person who persistently puts his spinal column at risk?

And how clever are governments that insist on debilitating their railway system, which also happens to be one of the most extensive in the world? But this is what successive Indian governments have been doing for the last 10 years.

Ever since coalition governments became the norm at the Centre, there has been a succession of railway ministers who held the portfolio only because they could cause severe damage to, or perhaps even bring down, the central government.

Thus, we have had Ram Vilas Paswan, Nitish Kumar (who was the best of the lot), Mamata Banerji, and now Lalu Prasad. Three of these are from Bihar.

One is from Bengal. Indeed, in the past 25 years, it was only during 1985-95 that the Railways had ministers from other states because, even during 1980-84, Abdul Ghani Khan Choudhuri of Malda, West Bengal, was the minister.

All of them, regardless of their parties, have raided the Railways as brutally as Nadir Shah raided Delhi. The exception was Madhav Rao Scindia (1985-89).

The modus operandi differed but the objective remained the same, with political and financial interests coming before the interests of the Railways and the country.

The results are there for all to see. The Indian Railways are starved of investment. Only a fourth of the country's rail network is double- or multi-track, and the signalling system, though better now, is still very far from being truly modern.

In consequence, track utilisation is poor. In China, on average, 120 trains pass through a track in a day. The number is less than half in India.

The pricing strategies are a joke with amazingly high cross-subsidies (nearly Rs 6,000 crore). The freight rates are absurdly high (30 per cent more than China, for instance).

In the US, it takes 24 paise to move a tonne of steel over one kilometre; in India, 79 paise. Overall, the tariffs on as many as 131 commodities, including coal, cement, iron ore and petrol, are up to 150 per cent over the cost.

The ratio of passenger fares to freight tariff in India is 0.3, against 1.3 in China. The average passenger fare charged by the Indian Railways is 24 paise per km, while it's 54.66 paise in China. Too many people are employed in the wrong jobs and too few in the right ones.

The Railways' trained workforce is aging and is not being replaced quickly enough.

The list of ills is endless. All this has had a severe impact on railway finances. Operating expenses and pensions are around 94 per cent of revenues, against 62 per cent in China.

Under the circumstances, it is amazing that railwaymen, in spite of their ministers, have managed to move as much as 105 million tonnes more (on average, 35 million tonnes per year since 2002), taking the total to 335 million tonnes for 2004-05.

Just imagine what this figure could have been if the ministers had been more enlightened. The message for the Prime Minister is clear. If he can't change the minister, he must at least force a change in the policy.