What's new

India has to choose between world-class railway or ramshackled one: Jaitley on fare hike

Rahul9090

FULL MEMBER
Joined
Feb 21, 2014
Messages
966
Reaction score
-1
Country
India
Location
India
New Delhi: Defending the steep hike in rail fare and freight rates as a 'difficult but correct decision', Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Saturday said the railways can survive only if users pay for availing of facilities.

"The passenger services have been subsidised by the freight traffic. In recent years, even freight fares have come under pressure," he said in his first reaction to the 14.2 percent increase in passenger fares and 6.5 percent hike in freight rates.

Stating that the choice before the government was to allow the railways to bleed and eventually walk into a debt trap or raise fares, Jaitley said, "India must decide whether it wants a world-class railway or a ramshackled one.

"The railway minister has taken a difficult but a correct decision...The Indian Railways for the last few years have been running at a loss. The only way that Railways can survive is when users pay for the facilities that they avail."
Jaitley, who will present the Union budget next month, said a loss-making railway would provide below-par services and would eventually not even have the resources to meet its expenditure.

In a Facebook posting titled 'The Truth of Railway Fare Hike', the minister said the decision to increase the rates was mooted by the Railway Board on February 5, when the United Progressive Alliance was in power.

The board proposed a 5 percent increase in freight rates and a 10 percent increase in passenger fares.

The proposal was to rationalise freight rates with effect from April 1 and passenger fares with effect from May 1, he said.

"Even as the Interim Budget of the Railways was yet to come, the date May 1, 2014, was chosen hoping that the general elections would be over by that day. The railways had proposed that this increase would give the railways an additional revenue of Rs 7,900 crore.

"Armed with this decision, the then Railway Minister Shri Mallikarjuna Kharge met the then Prime Minister Shri Manmohan Singh on February 11, 2014. The then Prime Minister approved the hike and suggested that both freight and passenger fares should be implemented with effect from May 1, 2014, itself," Jaitley said.

The Railway Board, Jaitley said, accordingly notified this increase on May 16, when the election results were being declared. The decision gave effect "to what the Railway Board, the Rail Minister and the then Prime Minister had concurred."

However, Jaitley added, then Railway Minister Kharge "developed cold feet and in the evening of May 16, 2014, even after the UPA had been defeated in the elections, he countermanded the order of the Railway Board so that theoretically the decision taken by him and the then Prime Minister is implemented by the Railway Minister of the NDA government."

Jaitley said that by withdrawing the countermanding order, current Railway Minister D V Sadananda Gowda has taken a challenging decision.

"The choice before Shri Gowda was whether to allow the Railways to bleed and eventually walk into a debt trap by following the policy of the UPA government or implement the decision which the UPA government had taken to increase the fares for both passenger and freight but did not have the courage to implement."




India has to choose between world-class railway or ramshackled one: Jaitley on fare hike
 
Majority will not listen or will try to understand that railway is in high debt or they need to modify stone age infrastructure & when something bad happens govt is blamed.Now new stage of politics will start..Samajwadi party,AAPtards,Congress,Most Muslim communities have already started barking!!Enjoy the show to let it get calmer & wait for final moment!:big_boss:
 
You have basically three Indias, stratified by money, and money only.

1/2 total population: extremely poor. That’s 500 million ppl. They squeak by somehow. Of that figure, some percentage (not really sure, I’m guessing maybe 15-20% or 75-100million ppl) are DIRT POOR. They don’t eat everyday. They may spend their entire lives browsing the public dumps for food and anything they can use at home or possibly resale.
That’s a staggering number, and more poverty than China. You may think Democracy and capitalism work better than communism and capitalism, but the experiment has already been done in India and China, and India (democracy) has lost. Capitalism will not do anything to change the poverty of these 500 million people. Why? It is not designed to, that’s why, and that is a pretty basic failure when it comes to a model on which to base an entire society.

About 450 million lower-, middle-, and upper-middle class. Yes they do the IT jobs and the service jobs (Hello, this is Krish, may I help you?) and the engineering jobs. There’s also a class that produces the arts (classical music and dance, and of course, all things Bollywood). They are not as wealthy as the tech and engineering billionaires, but they don’t have to be because those billionaires are their patrons.

Then there’s the superrich. They do what superrich people everywhere do, and are in fact better thought of as members of the global superrich society.

Yes, the caste system still exists, but in the final analysis, it’s the money that determines status.

But my point is, these are three totally different societies, even though they are all comprised of Indian people. I’d be very careful about lumping them together. My musician friends and associates are as far away from the impoverished India as I am sitting here in Seattle. In fact, they are closer to me culturally than they are to India’s poor.


How many times u will post this today ?
 
You have basically three Indias, stratified by money, and money only.

1/2 total population: extremely poor. That’s 500 million ppl. They squeak by somehow. Of that figure, some percentage (not really sure, I’m guessing maybe 15-20% or 75-100million ppl) are DIRT POOR. They don’t eat everyday. They may spend their entire lives browsing the public dumps for food and anything they can use at home or possibly resale.
That’s a staggering number, and more poverty than China. You may think Democracy and capitalism work better than communism and capitalism, but the experiment has already been done in India and China, and India (democracy) has lost. Capitalism will not do anything to change the poverty of these 500 million people. Why? It is not designed to, that’s why, and that is a pretty basic failure when it comes to a model on which to base an entire society.

About 450 million lower-, middle-, and upper-middle class. Yes they do the IT jobs and the service jobs (Hello, this is Krish, may I help you?) and the engineering jobs. There’s also a class that produces the arts (classical music and dance, and of course, all things Bollywood). They are not as wealthy as the tech and engineering billionaires, but they don’t have to be because those billionaires are their patrons.

Then there’s the superrich. They do what superrich people everywhere do, and are in fact better thought of as members of the global superrich society.

Yes, the caste system still exists, but in the final analysis, it’s the money that determines status.

But my point is, these are three totally different societies, even though they are all comprised of Indian people. I’d be very careful about lumping them together. My musician friends and associates are as far away from the impoverished India as I am sitting here in Seattle. In fact, they are closer to me culturally than they are to India’s poor.


Ah now i know I am talking to a robot. Carry on before getting banned.
 
Back
Top Bottom