March 23, 2012
Dinesh Trivedi, the now ex-railways minister, proposed an increase in passenger fares last week citing safety and modernization of the railways as primary concerns. The move resulted in his dismissal by West Bengal chief minister and his boss, Mamata Banerjee, who said the fare increase was unacceptable and demanded a rollback.
March 23, 2012
Dinesh Trivedi, the now ex-railways minister, proposed an increase in passenger fares last week citing safety and modernization of the railways as primary concerns. The move resulted in his dismissal by West Bengal chief minister and his boss, Mamata Banerjee, who said the fare increase was unacceptable and demanded a rollback.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr Trivedi stood by his proposal, and laid out serious concerns about the safety of India’s rail system, which is used by more than 7 billion passengers a year.
Q1. How many years is it precisely since the fares were last increased?
A1. Nine.
Q2. How long have the railways been making a loss?
A2. As far as the passenger is concerned, without budgetary support the railways has been operating at a loss ever since fare stopped going up, but more so in the last five years. The most recent annual loss was 20,000 crore (200 billion rupees, or about $3.9 billion).
Q3. How has it survived so far?
A3. Cross-subsidy of freight. When I talk about a loss, I mean on the passenger side. The earnings out of freight are 74 percent and the revenue from fares is 26 percent, so it was heavily cross-subsidized.
Q4.Why did you increase the fares?
A4. What I saw was that the operating ratio was 95 percent. My objective was to bring it down to 84 percent. This cross-subsidy business of increasing the freight charges all the time and subsidizing the fares was not a workable or sustainable model. I needed to address the safety and modernization aspects. The government did not give me what I wanted. We have to pay dividends on the budgetary support. It’s not like other countries where railways get a 100 percent grant. The problem was, where do I get the money from? So to sustain that, I had to do that.
Q5. Do you still stand by your decision to increase the fares?
A5. If I had to give the budget again, I would give the same budget. The passengers were telling me to increase the fares, the unions were telling me, the general public was telling me, everybody was telling me that if you don’t increase the fares you are going to turn the railway coaches into coffins. We have rats, we have cockroaches, there’s the problem of safety, it’s not modernized so we are running fifty years behind the world as far as railway is concerned, although it is a very robust system.
Q6. What is the answer to modernizing the trains now?
A6. At this rate it will never happen. And the worst sufferers will be the poor people. They don’t have any alternative, but we do. Really people have not understood.
Right now, the poorest people in India don’t travel by train. When it comes to the poorest of the poor, travel doesn’t mean only rail fare. It also means wherever you go you have to stay, spend money on food. Poor people do not have that money.
Even if they have to travel, unless they are employed and if they are employed then it means they are earning and those who are not earning, they don’t travel. If they have to, they travel within the state where we have a suburban system and as far as that is concerned I have decreased the fare with the izzat system. You pay the poorest of the poor who earn 1,500 rupees a month, the people who are below poverty level they can take a ticket of 25 rupees only per month and you could travel 100 kilometers (62 miles) any number of times, every day, twice a day.
I have increased that 100 kilometers to cover the entire suburban area of 150 kilometers. I have given them the freedom to travel any number of times within the suburban system. It’s like a season ticket. Those guys who are really poor and need to travel in suburban trains have got the facility.
So who are we talking about? No-one has come to me, no-one has protested. When I announced the increase everybody clapped. So what is this madness, in the sense, who is complaining? Nobody is complaining.
By not increasing fares, you are doing a disservice. All the facilities are going to air conditioned, two-tier class, and the general class is neglected the most.
My thinking was to give the general class the best facilities and charge them very little, so that for a journey of 500 kilometers, they would have to pay only 37 rupees more. Everybody was willing to pay.
Look at Delhi Metro and look at what we are charging in the classical rail. There is a tenfold difference but people are still traveling by metro. Who travels by buses? Again the common man. The difference between the rail and buses in the same state is more than five, seven, or even eight times difference. Now the bus traffic is coming to rail and the rail does not have any more capacity.
If you want to decongest you have to improve by doubling and tripling the rail lines. And where is the money going to come?
Q7. With regards to unmanned railway crossings, I can’t imagine it’s a lack of manpower – is it because there is just no money to pay people to do the jobs?
A7. Absolutely. I wanted to hire 200,000 people to deal with overall safety. I wanted to eliminate the railway crossings. I wanted to do the overbridge and underbridge and I had proposed a separate organization only to do this and eliminate all the crossings. Now where is this money going to come from? With this result there are a lot of vacancies in this safety area. We need to fix the tracks. I personally feel the railways will go back by fifty years.
God forbid, more and more accidents are going to take place and nobody has seen the reasons. This budget would have been passed easily if my party would not have objected. Since my party has objected there is some kind of a race to become populous. Members of parliament don’t realize that the general public wants the fares to go up. They know that if the fares don’t go up, there will be no facilities. You want to keep the poor deprived of quality services. That is the way I look at it.
Q8. What are the other areas of safety that concern you?
A8. The tracks develop cracks every other day. Signaling is as old as one can think of. It needs to be modernized. If I do not take care of the track and signaling I will not be able to address safety and increase the speed. I need to have cleanliness and fit green toilets. I cannot afford to have the way it is going on now as it is corroding my tracks. All these things require professionalization. There is too much politics in rail and a trend to discourage any kind of modernization and it is a sad story. If the railway is not robust, the economy of India will not grow.
Courtesy: indiablogs
