|
|
|
|
|
Death
on the Tracks Indian Railways is so busy being a patronage network it has no time for safety.
The railways is the ultimate welfare organisation. It looks after everybody -- workers, workers' families, ministers, sundry bureaucrats -- everybody except consumers. It expends 90 per cent of its traffic earnings on wage and maintenance bills. Little is left for such trifles as technology upgradation. The result: an average of 375 accidents a year. Indian Railways follows no known commercial logic. The bulk of its revenue comes from freight. This service is so over-priced as to start losing custom. Passenger fares are ridiculously subsidised because no minister wants to be unpopular with his voters. The deviant methods extend to other areas. Between 1962 and 1978 three major safety review reports were submitted. Some of the recommendations still lie unimplemented. The usual excuse is scarcity of funds. The railways, it seems, would prefer the morbid pleasure of handing out compensation cheques. Judicial Second Thought
When it is held that a public servant has wantonly exercised his power, it is the duty of the investigative agency to produce evidence, if any, of such wantonness crossing the limits laid out in the Prevention of Corruption Act. Justice (retired) Kuldip Singh, who delivered the 1996 judgement, was among a group of judges who had taken the initiative to invoke the inherent power of the courts to direct the slothful investigative agencies to probe deeper into charges and report back directly to the bench. The review of the judgement in Sharma's case shows that the court will no longer drive the anti-corruption agencies from the backseat. That carries the risk of a return to the old tradition of graft charges kept dangling or getting withdrawn to suit executive expediency. It is not a happy thought for India. |
||||
| Top |
 © Living Media India Ltd |
Two
days after Gaisal witnessed one of the most horrific accidents in Indian history, the
Railway Board made the profound declaration that "army-type discipline" would be
imposed to achieve a "zero accident rate". Somehow, more than a trenchant
resolve, it seemed a cruel joke on the 300 passengers who lost their lives on black
Monday, August 2. Statistics rarely tell the full story but in the case of Indian Railways
they say it all. It spends Rs 14,000 crore every year dispensing salaries but sets aside
no more than Rs 250 crore on signalling and communication. The railways is not a
quality-conscious business corporation; it is a gigantic monster that eats up resources
and manhours without remotely proportionate results. A succession of ministers have
treated it as only a patronage facilitator. Why, in Gorakhpur, where the north-eastern
zonal headquarters is located, lucrative rail contracts have spawned whole crime
syndicates. Malda is better connected by train than economic parameters would justify.
Nondescript Hajipur houses an important regional office. The list can go on. 
Wisdom and ambiguity cannot coexist in life,
least of all in judicial actions, which are the ultimate safeguard against executive
excesses. The Supreme Court's recent ruling on former petroleum minister Satish Sharma's
review petition against the Rs 50-lakh exemplary damages imposed on him in 1996 is
disconcertingly ambiguous. It reprimands Sharma for misusing his discretionary power in
allotment of petrol pumps as "atrocious" and reflecting a "wanton exercise
of power". In the same breath, it overturns the 1996 judgement, which imposed
exemplary damages, on the ground that the former minister's action though "wholly
unjustified" falls short of "malfeasance in public office". With Sharma
being refunded the money, his former ministerial colleague Sheila Kaul, who too was
ordered to pay exemplary damages for arbitrary housing allotments, can expect similar
treatment. That will put a court-delivered seal of finality on a series of closure of
anti-corruption cases, beginning this past year with the acquittal of most politicians
implicated in the hawala case.