Railway Budget 2013: no hike in passenger fares

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will raise a fuel surcharge of just under 5 percent on railway freight traffic but will not introduce another passenger fare hike, the railway minister said on Tuesday as he presented his ministry's budget to parliament.

India's railway network is the world's fourth largest but it has suffered from years of low investment and political meddling. The result is a creaking system plagued by delays, overcrowding and slow freight delivery times that sap the competitiveness of Asia's third-largest economy.

(Reporting by Manoj Kumar and Matthias Williams, editing by Ross Colvin)