Indian Railways holds a place of pride not just for India but at the global level too as it ferries lacs of customers every day from far lung areas and is one of the cheapest source of transportation. 8116 million travel by trains generating revenue worth INR 462.801 billion every year and from freight the earnings are INR 1020.28 billion annually. Even today rail connectivity means that the place can be easily identified on the national map. There are still small towns and villages which do not have proper connectivity in terms of railway lines which is a matter of concern for the government and every year the Railway Minister promises centum connectivity. Currently, the privatisation of Railways has raised many questions that should become part of public discourse.
The liberalisation of the economy in 1991 had set the stage for what was coming for the economy in terms of state intervention and the role of the market in it. Since the late nineties, there have been constant whispers about the privatisation of Konkan railways but so far it has not materialized. When Lalu Prasad Yadav became the Railway Minister, part-privatisation started with a lot of services being outsourced to public vendors making the department profitable for the first time. After him, the precedent was set for slowly privatizing bits and pieces of the services provided by the organisation without inviting the ire of the common man or the intelligentsia, all in the name of better services and general good. However, over the years there have been cases of theft, loot and arson which have revealed the confluence between the perpetrators of these acts and the private vendors.
Coming back to the privatisation of railways or the first private train Tejas which made its maiden run on 4th October 2019, the basic question is that are we ready for such an experiment and secondly is the timing good. The new Managing Director of International Monetary Fund, Ms Kristalina Georgieva said that India is the most affected country by the current bout of recession and as the incumbent government has often quoted the predictions of World Bank and International Monetary Fund, this statement needs to be taken seriously. In this time of recession and disparities becoming wider and more visible, thinking of a product only for the corporates and the rich shows poorly on the government. Secondly, though this train is being run by the subsidiary of IRCTC, they are not paying for the infrastructure that has been built by the state. Here, we come back to the old age question of why state-run businesses cannot be run as efficiently as private companies even with the welfare dimensions in place. I am remembered of a similar thing happening in my home state of Madhya Pradesh when Department of Roadways was closed down citing losses and lack of passengers. Now the same routes and roads made by the government are helping the private players to ply their buses on them and making sizable profits. The case of Railways too, is the same as the same track from Lucknow to Delhi will help Tejas to cut down on time and be “efficient”.
I am not against privatisation per se but I firmly believe that the infrastructure that has been built by the state should not be handed over to the private players overlooking the interest of the common man. The employees have to be taken into confidence so that they too become stakeholders in the upliftment of the organisation. The business model needs to be changed so as to accommodate the aspirations and requirements of the common man without giving way to crony capitalism and corruption. The sense of belongingness to such a huge organisation is very necessary to make it a corporate.
Another area which needs to be very seriously taken is the security and safety of railway tracks and trains. The government has sanctioned INR 114.18 crores for the safety and security of railways which needs to be increased and provisions have to be made to technological uplift the railways keeping in mind the weather conditions of the country so as to avoid mishaps. Every year there are many reported and non-reported accidents mainly because of human negligence and technologically also we fail to use the means at our disposal raising questions on the credibility of the organisation, though, in 2018-19, the railway's department has overhauled its tracks, the largest in the past fifty-five years. The separate Railway Budget needs to be restarted as this gave a clear picture of the finances and the vision of the government. There have also been constant voices stating that instead of starting new trains, the present trains need to be run on time with mechanization. The services that have been leased out to the private players have to be made more accountable, both in terms of quality and delivery.
On 7th October 2019, Amitabh Kant, the CEO of NITI Aayog wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Railway Board talking about the privatisation of 50 stations and 150 trains in the first phase. This is in relation to making the services world-class forgetting that these services will come at a cost which a large majority of people using this service are unable to bear. If the sole motive is to pull customers from airlines to railways, especially the fringe buyers, then too, this strategy reeks of high handedness of the government and is almost like a slap on the face of the commoners. This systematic withdrawal of the state from the basic services is a matter of concern. The society has to be equitable for the state to be just administrator.
