Only soft ops to be handed

Vijay Kumar Dutt
Former additional member, Railway Board-Traction

Only soft part of railway operations are being handed over to private operators with a robust regulatory mechanism in place. It is good to see that the government has moved in this direction and an empowered committee of secretaries has been constituted. As of now, the Indian Railways has on an experimental basis given its branded Tejas train to be operated by the IRCTC.

The soft part of operations includes most of the commercial activities like ticketing, catering and packaged tour programmes. The Railways has been losing a huge amount both in the passenger business and freight. In the first case, it is because the Railways could not keep pace with the requirements of time and in case of the latter, because of cross-subsidy, which has ended up making freight carriage charges highest in the world and less competitive to the road network.

Read Also

• Private players train eyes on berth of a new era
• A ride in country’s first ‘corporate-run’ express
• Former top officers all agree: Correct step, best option
• Old proposal, but new zeal

India, too, needs to expand its railway network in a big way to become competitive. For all this, the class which can pay should be provided with attractive facilities and the surplus could be used for subsidising poorest of the poor. With this, the Railways can shift to intra-cross-subsidy instead of inter-cross-subsidy, which is subsidising passenger fare with freight charges.

In case of stations, we should not use the term privatisation. There are two kinds of operations the Railways undertakes now. One is safety and the other commercial. The safety functions will always remain with the Railways. But services like lounges, kiosks for the private sector will save resources for the Railways to invest in core activities.