RailEnquiry

The death of five persons in Kerala in a train-car collision at an unmanned crossing on Sunday may not figure among the major accidents that have occurred on Indian Railways of late. However, they poignantly underline the fact that it has not moved even an in inch towards fulfilling the promise made by the then railway minister Mamata Banerjee while presenting the rail budget for 2010-’11 that all unmanned crossings would be eliminated. During the last 10 years, eight politicians have held charge of the railways portfolio for varying terms. Except Nitish Kumar in the NDA regime and Lalu Prasad in UPA-I and brief interregnums when the prime minister held charge as a stop-gap arrangement, the department has been run as a fiefdom by the Trinamool Congress chief herself or by one of her nominees.Throughout her tenure as the railway minister, the TMC chief had little time to spare for the railways. Most of the time she ran the department through remote control from Kolkata, devoting more attention to West Bengal politics and used the railways as a tool to promote that politics. After she took over as chief minister of West Bengal, the portfolio has been shuffled between Mukul Roy, Dinesh Trivedi and back to Mukul Roy, depending on her whim and she has been dictating its policy from the Writer’s Building. When Roy got a second and comparatively longer innings as the minister after the unceremonious removal of Trivedi for daring to defy Mamata’s writ, he spent more time in Kolkata taking directives from his boss than attending his office in Rail Bhawan in New Delhi.

The TMC’s withdrawal from the UPA has now given Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a chance to rejuvenate the world’s largest rail network. Railway is the nation’s lifeline but under UPA-II it has almost been killed. If Singh is serious about his avowed resolve to revive the national economy, he should give the Indian Railways top priority and funds required to put it back on track. More important, he should entrust the department to someone who has time and the capability to do so.