‘Merger to take away railways autonomy’

As the Modi government aims to merge the Rail Budget with the Union Budget, public accounts committee (PAC) chairman K.V. Thomas said on Sunday that the aim — as had been with scrapping of the Planning Commission — is to further centralise power, besides taking away parliamentary scrutiny of a ministry that has maximum public interfaces in the country.

The Asian Age first reported about the government having initiated the process of merging the Rail Budget with the Union Budget. The finance ministry is currently examining the proposal floated by Union railway minister Suresh Prabhu for doing away with the 92-year-old practice of presenting a separate Rail Budget.

“The Narendra Modi government has a penchant for centralising power. It scrapped the Planning Commission and brought in a Niti Aayog with hardly any mandate. Now, the move to scrap the Rail Budget will amount to making the railway ministry subservient to the finance ministry. The functional autonomy of the railways will go if such a move goes through,” Mr Thomas told this newspaper.

While the argument for a common Budget, as stated by the proponents, is that the ministry of finance will need to provide for the deficit in the railway finances to own up the social service aspect of the national transporter.

Mr Thomas said the railways will have much squeezed financial autonomy to honour its mandate to improve the services, besides expansion of the network and facilities. Because, he said, the ministry of finance may not provide for enough funds. “Also, a separate Rail Budget ensured much larger parliamentary scrutiny of the performances of the railways ministry. With the possibility of the railways becoming just another chapter in the Union Budget, the members of the Parliament may not have enough scope to minutely examine its functioning,” added Mr Thomas.

With more than two-and-a-half crore people using the railway network everyday, Mr Thomas argued that the Rail Budget still has relevance for an independent existence. He said the apparent trend to centralise power does not augur well for the country.