The Railway Board has come up with a circular asking station managers to ensure books pertaining to Indian tradition, culture, values, morals and history be put on display at the bookstalls on platforms across the country.
Not a bad idea, of course. But it would sound curious that the board has shown the courage to speak about values and morals, when it is seen to be one of India’s most corrupt entities that is taking the railways to the depths of inefficiency and loot over the past many years. All these are happening right under the noses of successive railway ministers.
The three years of the BJP-led Narendra Damodardas Modi government have been the worst time for the Railways, exemplified by the series of rail mishaps – the latest of which happened in Orissa by way of a goods train derailment Tuesday.
This period saw a lack of momentum in the matter of railway restructuring. Very few new trains have been introduced, and line lengths see no major extensions. Other than for the move on introducing a bullet train service from Mumbai to Ahmedabad, still at the ‘foundation stone’ stage, the Indian Railways has seen no visionary touch in recent years.
The express trains are running at an average speed of no more than 80kmph, the speed touching up to a little above 100km in select cases, and this is a shame on India. It demonstrated India’s lost opportunities in this sector even after the initial head-start it got under the British rule.
By contrast, the total line length has only marginally improved in India in recent decades, set against massive new infrastructure build-up in China and elsewhere in Asia region itself. China’s latest technology makes its premium trains run at a speed of about 400km per hour.
The Railway Board that lords over the Indian Railways is believed to be composed largely of men with vested interests and having allegedly shown a propensity to indulge in massive loot of the railway funds, aided by a network of fraudulent equipment suppliers and contractors.
The Pawan Bansal episode was just one proof of how the Railway Board and its commercial managers across the country functioned. Expectations were that the change of government at the Centre, from the UPA to the NDA, would help improve such matters.
Rather, things have worsened at multiple fronts during the Modi era, and the reasons are not far to seek. The Railway ministry saw change of guard within months of Modi’s ministry-making, when Sadananda Gowda was shifted from the post of Railway minister, and the job handed over to Suresh Prabhu.
Gowda did little to improve matters, and the first rail budget had nothing special to crow about. Same with Suresh Prabhu’s budget, which beat around the bush and did not come with any fancy schemes to put the railways back on the right track. Then came the questionable integration of the Rail Budget with General Budget.
Last month saw Prabhu being shunted out in the context of major rail mishaps and the ministry landing in the lap of Piyush Goyal. What Modi has to show today by way of a forward momentum in the Railway sector is just the laying of a foundation stone for the bullet train project in Gujarat at the hands of Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe, two weeks ago. Too little, too late.
In the context of mass perceptions that the Railway Board is not able to do the right job at the right time, there were persistent demands that this white elephant needed a major overhaul. The Modi government slept over the matter.
Those who travel by railways know things are progressively turning from bad to worse. This is exemplified also in the way derailments take place — as in the case of the Kalinga Utkal Express mishap and the several other mishaps where the cause was attributed to negligence of railway officials.
The need of the hour is to attend to serious matters, but the Railway Board and the Railway ministry are failing to rise to the occasion. Instead, the Board’s — and by extension the ministry’s — obsession is obviously on matters like imparting moral lessons to the train passengers. This, when the board itself is seen to be having a serious deficit of it by way of perpetuating massive corruption in the Railways.