Anjan Roy
The Union Railway Minister was sacked not a long while back. Unfortunately, we will soon get another Railway Minister. But then, do we really need a Railway Minister? It is time that the issue is examined and acted upon.
The cue in this respect might be taken from a recent move of the Chinese. China had abolished its Railway Ministry just after it had overseen and successfully implemented the largest ever expansion of any railway network. The recent expansion of the network has made it one of the largest, if not the largest, in the world.
The extensive Chinese railway network has been handed over to a holding company, which will run the railway system as a purely commercial undertaking. That is how a railway system should be organised. Not as a department of the Central Government of the country. Many of the avenues for corruption will be plugged when an essentially commercial activity is run as such.
Indian railways has been thoroughly politicised under the present system of its organisation. Under the present system, apart from giving rise to scope for making illegal money, the railway finances have been the biggest victims of politicisation. Fixing railway fares and tariffs have been on political considerations rather as an exercise for determining the price for a service in a competitive market where there are others offering the same.
During her long tenure as a railway minister, Mamata Banerjee, refused to revise railway fares to project her pro-poor image, thereby ruining the finances of the entire railway network. In the process it has neither served the poor, nor the economy. By the time she left railways, it had gone bankrupt.
Successive ministers have used the railways as instruments for serving their political goals in many other ways. There are some innocuous political uses – like demand for and opening new stations in places where these were not deserved. Then there were other ways of politically using railways. It is a well-known fact that railway ministers have personally encouraged recruitment of large number of employees from their own vote banks. These gave them votes in times of election.
From there, postings of critical senior officials in positions where they can extract bribes for placing multi-crore rupees orders has been a small transition. It was not even waiting to happen.
If large scale recruitment at lower levels for building vote banks of railway ministers weakened the organisation by burdening it with unproductive or inefficient workers, taking bribes which influenced large scale purchases of railway requirements was even dangerous. Bribes could push low quality and unsafe products and this can jeopardise railway safety. Possibly this was happening, given the large number of accidents on the railways.
Consider the current case. A bribe of Rs 10 crore was demanded for posting of a senior official as member of the railway board. These members take decisions on purchase of electrical systems, signalling equipment or rolling stock purchases. They take operational decisions on placing of wagons to deciding on imposition of demurrage fees for late release of wagons.
The cumulative effect of any of these decisions can run into huge amounts of money. Just by waiving imposition of penalty form demurrage can run into several crores of rupees every day, given the extensive railway network in the country. Purchase of electrical equipment alone runs into thousands of crore annually.
Companies are fighting to get a share of these orders and they are only too willing to offer bribes to secure these lucrative deals. If a person is offering as much as Rs10 crore for a railway board level positing, it is only reasonable that extortions would be several times that amount during the tenure of the concerned official. This is happening today because all decision-making is centralised and the political connection could dictate as the minister is the final dictator.
In fact, a high level committee on railways performance had recommended corporatisation of the railways years ago. The committee’s recommendations regarding reorganisation of the Indian railways were not even examined seriously as politicians, who should have taken such a decision, were not willing to let go there powers to leverage whatever they wanted to do with the railways.
The current monolithic structure should also be dismantled. The railways could be split up into competing companies so that they should provide quality service to get a share of the transportation market.
The railways as a part of the Government of India had a historical context. It served the colonial administration to have the railway network under its direct control to get access to the market and the resources of the country. It had served as an instrument of colonisation. That is long over. Today, Government hold over the entire railway network is only giving berth to political lunatics and corrupts. It should end. (IPA)
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