Rail Budget 2012: Why the Rail Board is unworthy of trust

The Railways are a state within a state with the attitude of a village. Successive railway ministers in the past two decades, most notably Mamata Banerjee and Ram Vilas Paswan, have driven the Railways to rack and ruin. Commentators in the media have excoriated them and rightly so. But the faceless gnomes of the Railway Board cannot escape blame for hollowing out the organisation from within. They are unworthy of the trust reposed in them.

Is it not truly a disgrace that an organisation with USD 23 billion in annual revenue should allow open defecation when eradication of the practice is a national priority? Can there be anything more primitive than the sight of toilet droppings in railway stations? Would it be an exaggeration to suggest that the Railways are the single largest institutionalised carriers of disease, considering that they move the equivalent of the nation once in 50 days or 2% of the population every day? Installation of no-discharge vacuum toilets or safe discharge ones that employ microbes does not require huge financial outlay.

But the Railway Board is so blas