Onerous task ahead for new Rlys minister

As the third railway minister in the NDA government since 2014, Piyush Goyal carries the onerous responsibility of achieving what his predecessors had aimed at but failed to attain — a turnaround of India’s largest public transporter.

He became the 10th railway minister in eight years after PM Narendra Modi shifted him from the power ministry on Saturday to head the world’s fourth-largest rail network that carries 23 million passengers each day.

His predecessor Suresh Prabhu had offered to resign after a string of fatal crashes.

The government is trying to revamp the transporter, but it continued to creak and groan under the weight of its own contradictions despite frequent changes at the helm.

Networks are as clogged as they were decades ago, with 40% or 492 of 1,219 sections running at 100% or above-line capacity.

The rolling stock such as locomotives, coaches or wagons remain antiquated and — with modernisation not happening at the desired pace — British-era maintenance systems are still practised. The operating ratio, which estimates the organisation’s financial health by calculating every paisa spent against a rupee earned, has been trundling upwards. From 75.9% in 2007-08 to 92% in 2016-17.

Prabhu attempted to address several structural issues, laying out a roadmap of ₹8.5 lakh crore over the next five years. Allocations and delivery schedules for infrastructure creation such as track renewals, electrification or signalling had been enhanced too. A sustained effort was put to improve passenger services.

It can, however, be argued that the efforts in the past two years to scale up railway operations came at the cost of weakening established systems and processes.

For instance, Prabhu’s decision to elevate an Indian Railways Stores Service cadre officer as chairman of the railway board and awarding him a two-year extension after retirement had sent ripples in the bureaucracy.

The new minister will have more than a handful on his dashboard. Re-energising the morale of the 13.5 lakh employees will be just one of the tasks he will need to tackle.