Happy journey!

You expect us to pay? Excuse me, Mr Minister? You can’t be serious! Don’t you know that in the sarkari sector there is really no link between what you pay for and what you get? Like you pay for public healthcare, through taxes and often direct fees. But when you need it, government medical centres — from health centres in villages right up to the biggest hospitals in the biggest cities — welcome you like the spiralling well of death, lacking facilities, staff, beds, drugs, hygiene, civility, sympathy and even doctors. So why would we pay for government services, Mr Dinesh Trivedi?

Besides, we get brand new stuff free. Like new hospitals, schools, trains, committees, plans. Who cares whether they work or not, it makes us happy. Being happy is important, you know. Especially in these troubled times.
Just look at your boss, Mamata Banerjee, whom you have been saluting so vocally, even while presenting your defiant Railway Budget. She never expects us to pay for services we demand. See how her dogged opposition to hiking rail fares while showering us with fresh, new, poetically named trains helped get her the chief ministership of West Bengal. And there’s Nitish Kumar, too. It’s customary to use the railway ministry to further your personal ambitions in your own state.
Instead, you talk of safety. Life is an adventure, mantriji, it doesn’t come with a guarantee card. No one is safe. Are you safe, Mr Rail Minister, especially now that your party has pulled the plug on you? How can you even think of mundane stuff like safety when people are dying all around you? They need to smile, they need to feel pampered. Give them promises. Give them new trains, new stations, new routes, new dreams. What? You have, too? Oh yes. You have indeed showered us with new trains as well, including scores of express trains for Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal. Sure, you have been kind to West Bengal, your state, and more importantly, the state ruled by your boss. Why Kolkata alone got 44 new suburban trains and 50 new metro links? And you have given West Bengal a rash of new projects.
Fine. But why on earth would you want to raise fares? Just because the railway is on the brink of bankruptcy? It’s a terribly old structure, you know, why put our money into it? More than 50,000 of rail bridges in use now are over 100 years old. Tracks and coaches are almost as ancient, too. The signalling system largely remains the way the British left it. Oh no, Mr Trivedi. It makes no sense to drown our money in this old and decrepit system.
Of course it’s unsafe. It’s 150 years old! What we need is a brand new railway network. Forget modernisation. Start afresh. If the railways are the lifeline of India, as experts say, that’s the least you can do. Anything less would be anti-people.
There you go again, harping on safety, safety, safety. Yes, we know that the Kakodar Committee’s report on railway safety last year found grave faults with the system and suggested a `1 lakh crore outlay to make the railways safer. And that the Pitroda Committee recommended an investment of `5.6 lakh crore for modernisation and better services. We know that the running cost of railways takes up 95 per cent of what it makes, which leaves no money for such vital, urgent changes. We know that you have about 1.5 lakh vacancies in your safety departments which you cannot fill. And that you have no money for new signalling systems, new coaches, locomotives or tracks that would make our journeys safer. But that’s your problem. We have problems of our own. And we refuse to pay for better services or a safe journey.
Indian train fares are amongst the lowest in the world. We must keep it that way. We also have one of the world’s largest rail networks, and one of the most unsafe — so in 2010 alone we accounted for 28 per cent of the world’s major train accidents. Hundreds are killed in train accidents in India every year. And several more — about 15,000 a year — are killed at level crossings and other railway tracks. Everyone, including the Prime Minister, has voiced concern about railway safety, but nothing has moved. That’s okay. In a poor country, life is cheap. So should train fares be.
For ages, rail ministers have been keeping us happy by not raising passenger fares but hiking rail freight charges. That way, industry pays high rates to cart their stuff around and the revenue goes towards subsidising passengers. Of course, the added expense of cargo makes goods costlier and we have more reason to grumble about life being tough, and to oppose hikes in train fares. In short, by raising only freight rates and not passenger fares, the government makes everyone pay indirectly for the train travel of some.
Besides, as road transport becomes more competitive, railways may lose out if freight rates are hiked too much. Which would kill its only steady stream of revenue. So in the long run, maybe it is better to pay for your own travel, and not make everyone including the neighbourhood rickshawwallah subsidise it.
But then, hiking train fares is a classic “anti-people” act. Allowing people to die on the tracks due to systemic negligence is not. Unleashing new, faster trains that clog up the tracks and make maintenance work near impossible is pro-people. Making these heavier, faster, airconditioned trains run over precarious ancient bridges not designed for such loads is pro-people. But trying to make these journeys safer by making the passenger pay a little more is not. Announcing new technology is pro-people. Trying to implement it would not be, because that would need money, which would come from the people, through raised fares or general taxes. So who’s to bell the cat?
It’s bizarre that in a mature democracy we can get away with projecting populist sops as “pro-people”. And happily ignore thousands of deaths on the tracks every year. And demand that even after huge hikes in fuel prices train passenger fares remain the same as a decade ago.
Maybe that is why we have a separate Rail Budget. To give a privileged minister the chance to play to the gallery just before the real Budget makes us keel over in shock. Maybe the best pro-people step would be to scrap the Rail Budget altogether.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com