Rail Budget 2012: Hits and misses
Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi on Wednesday proposed the first hike in passenger fares in nine years and the highest ever annual plan outlay for the Railways at Rs 60,100 crore, of which Rs 50,000 crore he said, would be from market borrowing.
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“Indian Railways is passing through a difficult phase," Trivedi told Parliament. "If we do not strengthen Indian railways, I'm afraid we weaken our country," he added, in a speech that was peppered with poetry and occasionally interrupted by fellow Parliamentarians' applause as well as boos.
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Presenting his first Rail Budget, the minister said he needs to modernize 19000 km of rail tracks that carry the most traffic, besides laying new track, particularly in tribal and underdeveloped regions of the country need to be connected.
The bill for this is expected to be about Rs 6,467 crore. -
In a candid statement, the minister said he was “not satisfied with the safety standards in India”. To rectify this, he added, safety standards should be benchmarked to those in Europe and Japan.
Both those regions have large railway networks that run superfast trains. -
The minister also proposed to set up an independent Railway Safety Authority as a statutory body. As par of the focus on safety, he said that all unmanned level crossings will be removed in the next five years, pointing out that were responsible for a large number of accidents.
