Don't expect path-breaking announcements: Titagarh

He thinks that there’s a little possibility of reducing passenger rail fares, but feels that Railway Minister Mallikarjun Kharge may introduce variable passenger component.

“I was seeing some media reports (on declining passenger traffic). So, they might come in terms of some kind of a variable passenger fare structure, like prevalent in the airline industry,” he said.

Below is the interview of Umesh Choudhary, Vice Chairman at Titagarh Wagons with Latha Venkatesh on CNBC-TV18. 

Q: What are you looking forward to today?

A: What we are hoping is we should see some initiatives towards the projects, which had already been announced. For the clear roadmap to be there for implementation of those because many of these big ticket projects like the dedicated freight corridor although we have seen some momentum but they need to be implemented in a more time bound fashion.

We would definitely like to see some announcements towards attracting or growth of railway traffic, we have been seeing that for the first time in the last seven-eight years, the railways share the traffic have come down from 36 percent by a couple of percentage points. That is a very disturbing trend and there is a lot of potential available.

For example, the railways have introduced the automobile fright train operator scheme, which has a potential of growing multifold. So we hope to see some of these policies being given a fillip and some more thrust on them. What we hope not to see is no more new factories being announced by the railways because as it is there is a surplus capacity in company like ours has so much of capacity and has been starving for want of orders.

So what we would not like to see is further announcement of new factories being set up all over the country while the existing capacities are languishing. But overall, I do not expect that there are going to be path-breaking announcements that are likely to be an interim budget as we have seen in most of the election years over the last few decades that the interim budget has not seen in many path-breaking announcements but some of these are what we hope to see today.

Q: Will there be any populist steps you think like shaving off passenger rates in some form or the other?

A: I don’t think so because there is absolutely very little possibility if not remote possibility for them to rollback passenger fare or reduce passenger fares but this variable fuel component, which was introduced has already taken care or some part of the passenger fare adjustment. But we have seen the passenger traffic also drop last month.

I was seeing some of the media reports that the passenger traffic has dropped. So maybe they might come in terms of some kind of a variable passenger fare structure like is prevalent in the airline industry that is something which is possible.

On behalf of CII, we have also from the railway equipment division given them a few recommendations, which essentially are hovering on the speedier investments on the big ticket projects, on the procurement side we have requested them to consider long-term procurement policies and clarity of procurement policies with time bound settling of tenders, which are floated.

On safety we have recommended that they should create a non-lapsable safety fund, which should have a clear-cut demarcation and on the railways customer side, on the freight side, we have requested that there should be some kind of a segregation of the large customers. For example, people who are giving railways more than Rs 1,000 crore revenue so that there is a special cell that deals with them and some stability in the fare structure. There should not be any mid-term fare structure changes or increases and they should be more consultative.