Prabhu Details Passenger Amenities, Leaves Lot Of Gaps

What stands out the most in Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu’s second budget? The complete silence on fares. Every minister before him has failed to resist temptation to offer some populist sops on fares and Prabhu deserves applause for not going down the same path.

But it may be too early to heave a sigh of relief (for those inclined to do so). The minister spoke about readying a bill to set up a Rail Development Authority (RDA, announced in his first budget). And if the RDA is structured as a truly independent authority, fare setting will become a non-political exercise, and the ridiculously low passenger fares may be a thing of the past.

Prabhu’s second budget turned out to be more realistic and rooted to ground realities than his first. The first held out dreams of bullet trains when basic services were still abysmal and that earned him a lot of sneers and jibes. He seems to have corrected this skew in the second outing.

So, there’s a lot of focus on passenger amenities – cleaner stations, better toilets, drinking water, food, charging points for phones, better ticketing services. In fact, passenger amenities took up the maximum time in the minister’s speech. If he does manage to bring a consumer focus to what is basically a slothful and uncaring public sector organisation, over the next few years, that will be a huge feather in his cap. But improved passenger amenities could be a way of softening the blow of tariff increases. The main obstacle to raising tariffs is the abysmal state of passenger services – people could hardly be expected to pay more for rundown coaches, stinking toilets etc., in the hope of future improvement. But their resistance may be muted if they get to see better facilities before.

Creditable also is the focus on freight movement – the promise on the dedicated freight corridors and port connectivity projects. Exporters keep complaining that it takes longer to move goods within India and especially to ports than it takes to transport them to export destinations.

But one cannot help being a sceptic here. Will these projects get completed on time? Prabhu promises to set new benchmarks in project execution and moving from an approach of completing projects to commissioning projects. He promises to commission 7 km of broad gauge lines every day and increasing this rate steadily. But can he get the slothful railways to do this? The largest number of public sector projects costing Rs 150 crore and above with time and cost overruns belong to the railways, with the delays ranging from three months to over 20 years. These figures are from the quarterly project implementation status report for July-September 2015.

How is Prabhu going to improve the railways’ project management skills?

Prabhu spoke at length about non-traditional sources of revenue – he rued that non-fare income accounts for less than 5 per cent of total revenue against 10-20 per cent globally. But the sources he mentioned – station redevelopment, monetizing land adjoining tracks as well as soft assets, advertising – are the same that successive railway ministers have been talking about ever since Mamata Banerjee flagged this in the early 2000s. Why have these not yielded the desired revenues? And if they have not, is it not time to look at new sources of non-fare revenue?

It is not adequately clear how changing the nomenclature of coolies to sahayaks is going to help. Porters have, over the years, become highly unionised and there is enough anecdotal evidence that people are increasingly preferring to carry their own luggage than deal with porters. Prabhu did mention about training them in soft skills, but whether that will help remains to be seen. Unless it is driven home to the porters that their attitude change is vital to their earnings, a mere nomenclature change may not help.

It’s also not clear how the Antyodaya Express is going to be different from the Garib Raths that Lalu Prasad Yadav got started in 2005. And many trains already have unreserved coaches – so how is adding Deen Dayalu coaches (for unreserved travel) going to be different from these?

Prabhu’s overall budget may be positive in its thrust and tone, but these niggling doubts will need to be addressed.