There can scarcely be any two opinions on the need to beef up the country’s conventional mode of transport of goods and passengers that had stood the test of time with finesse in the past. But the gargantuan capex (capital expenditure) plan the Railways had drawn up defies both finance and reality unless the system undergoes a thorough overhaul, both the way it functions and the way it delivers its services to the users, the individual traveler and the user industry in transporting its goods/wares.

With the total length of railway track in the country as on March 31, 2015 at 1,17,996 kilometers, the freight traffic handled by Indian Railways (IR) has multiplied several fold from 73.2 million tonnes in 1950-51 to 1104.17 million tonnes in 2015-16. The number of passengers booked in the railways has swollen from 3680.27million in 1990-91to 8151.90 million in 2015-16. The train travel even a few decades ago when amenities were not anything to gloat over, was still a splendid experience down the memory lane in savoring the bucolic beauty of cross-country when one travelled between Chennai and the capital of the country.

But today train travel has only but travails to bear with no comforts even if one travels in air-conditioned coaches with meager passenger services ranging from basic toilet facility to the eatables that one gets in the same pan-India journey that continues to take more than a day and a half. The lugubrious charade on the arterial mode of transport the country is credited with is only meant to highlight how such a great institution as the IR has descended into its extant state of dilapidation rapidly, thanks to the short-sighted policies of successive railway ministers and the ostrich-like unreason of its army of employees who do not relish any substantive reforms being introduced or implemented even by degrees.

Way back in the early 1990s under the reform-driven Narashima Rao leadership, the then Railway Minister Jaffar Sharieff first floated the proposal of incremental deregulation in the system including the commercial exploitation of the land the IR had at its disposal. The silver jubilee year of India’s tryst with trade and economic policy reform is still on till July but the track record of the IR in terms of improving its operational efficiency and serving the users efficaciously through implementation of copious pro-market policy measures recommended by a raft of Committees all through these bygone years, remains dim and grim!

The latest one such weighty report of the Railway Convention Committee headed by the suave BJD member Bhartruhari Mahtab, presented to Parliament on May 10, on the commercial utilization of vacant land in general and the role of Rail Land Development Authority (RLDA) created to oversea and execute action in particular, makes a quite somber assessment. Foremost, it needs to be noted that in the full-fledged Rail Budget Suresh Prabhu presented in 2015-16, he laid out a five year investment plan of a massive Rs 8,56,020 crore. Significantly, as conceded by the Minister of State of Railways Manoj Sinha in the Lok Sanha in a written reply that the IR have 458 major ongoing projects, including 166 new line,39 gauge conversion and 253 doubling projects, that entail about Rs 3.86 lakh crore for their completion.

With such a spate of investment proposals and programmes under way, the IR must perforce have to do innovative financing and the professional auditor the Minister is, he did not shy away from undertaking the borrowing route including co-opting public institutions like the LIC and the State governments to take the tab. While all these are laudable, over and above the implicit risks they carry to the long-term health of the system in the event of plans going amiss or lenders developing cold feet midway, the IR too can look inward to find resources.

As of now, the railways have roughly 0.46 lakh hectare vacant lands, mostly in the form of narrow strips along the tracks, used for servicing and maintenance of track, bridges and other rail infrastructure. This vacant land is availed of for execution of various infra-related projects for meeting future growth needs of railways which include projects like doubling/tripling and traffic facilities work. The vacant land which is not required by railways for its immediate operational needs is utilized in the interim period for commercial development through Rail Land Development Authority (RLDA) in order to mobilize additional resources.

The RLDA which came into being in January 2007 for generation of non-tariff revenue through commercial utilization of railway land and air space had earned Rs 1215 crore in these nine years. The Committee is rather ‘disturbed’ to find that during 2014-15, the earnings of RLDA has drastically fallen to a meager sum of Rs 26.63 crore against the 2013-14 earning of Rs 559.82 crore. With 914.80 hectare of land belonging to the railways under encroachment, the RCC is unable to digest the Railway Ministry’s contention that this forms only 0.19 per cent of rail way land under encroachment out of the 4.61 lakh hectare land vested with the system. “This is no consolation to the Committee in view of the precious value of land, which could be productively used by the railways to augment their financial position”.

The RCC berated the railways that not a single site out of the 47 the RLDA itself identified has been commercially developed as yet due “to slump in the real estate sector, availability of free hold property in major cities/towns where most of the commercial sites are located and inordinately long time taken for obtaining the Change of Land Use (CLU).” It deplored that the “non- development of a single site commercially till date has tended to negate the very purpose of setting up of RLDA”. Even as Prabhu is going out of the way to woo the States to enlist their participation in building rail infrastructure, the Committee is disturbed and concerned by the “reported reluctance on the part of some state governments to cooperate with the Railways/RLDA”

The RCC has however appreciated the digitization of the railways land holdings as also the fact that almost 3800 hectares of vacant railway land is under commercial licensing with the zonal railways for sliding connectivity, catering units, goods etc. It said such a dispensation has fetched Rs 1300 crore to the system in 2014-15 and this is likely to exceed in 2015-16. It is time the IR management made a root and branch reform to transform the system into a model public transport system for the sole benefit of its users who do not have any vaulting expectations than reasonable return or value for the money they pay.(IPA Service)