Reference Auto

Mamata Banerjee seems to have set sights on West Bengal elections with her Railway Budget for 2011-12. In Singur, Mamata may have forced the Tatas to leave, causing a loss of thousands of direct or indirect employment.

But in her Railway Budget, she has given the people of Singur enough reason to smile by announcing the setting up of a coach factory there.

For Bengal, there are a slew of goodies: a rail industrial park is set to come up in Nandigram and a metro coach factory in Kolkata. A track-machine industry is also slated to come up in Uluberia.

Outside Bengal, factories will also be set up in Rae Bareilly (UP), Jammu and Kashmir along with Manipur in the North East.

Mamata has played the populist card again in this year’s Railway Budget by leaving fares of all classes untouched.

Moreover, booking charges for a/c and non-a/c seats have been pared by 50 per cent and online ticketing is slated to get cheaper soon.

Concessions for senior citizens (men) have been cut by 10% to 30%. Also, the age limit for women to qualify as a senior citizen has been brought down from 60 to 58.

Concessions will also be available for the physically challenged in the Rajdhanis as well as the Shatabdis. Three new Shatabdis will roll out along the Pune-Secunderabad, Jaipur-Agra and Ludhiana-Delhi sectors.

There will also be new Durontos along the Allahabad-Mumbai, Pune-Ahmedabad, Sealdah-Puri, Madurai-Chennai, Chennai-Thiruvananthapuram and Mumbai Central-New Delhi routes.

Mamata has also provided a booster dose for Mumbai, launching 47 additional trains along the Mumbai suburban route. Overall, 200 new trains will come up, and many of them for North-East India.

Just like in airports, Mamata is also planning to roll out trolleys in stations. But it seems, the plan will be launched in the Metros along with tier-1 cities first and later on in other towns. The Rail Budget has also made provision for over 442 stations to be completed and 584 spruced up in two years.

The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure has given green light to 24 of Mamata’s projects, of which 10 are from West Bengal.

While presenting this year’s Railway Budget, Mamata said, “Keeping in view freight traffic projection of 993 million tonnes and passenger growth of 6.4 per cent over the previous year, earnings could be at Rs 1,06,239 crore assuming a clearance of Rs 200 crore from traffic suspense.”

Mamata’s Railway Budget may be Bengal-friendly but why blame her as almost every railway minister has shown a bias towards his home state, as for instance, even former ministers like Ram Vilas Paswan (who made Madhepura in Bihar a railway hub) and others like Lalu Yadav and Nitish Kumar have made previous Budgets Bihar-friendly.