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Media slams the Railway Budget

The media slammed the Railway Budget on Tuesday, saying the railway minister had framed it with an eye on upcoming assembly elections in her home state.

Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday sidestepped pressure to increase passenger fares and left freight rates for essential commodities unchanged in her annual railway budget to parliament.

It included 24 new trains, seven of which will connect her home state of West Bengal which will be going to the polls in April.

"Polls around the corner, so gravy train for Bengal," was the front page headline of The Indian Express.

Financial daily The Economic Times, was equally scathing in its criticism.

"Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee's second budget is recklessly and disappointingly populist; riddled with wholly unwarranted subsidies and giveaways," the paper said in an editorial. "This is unalloyed political opportunism run amok plain and simple," it added.

Analysts say that Banerjee, who heads the Trinamool Congress, a part of the federal coalition, could give West Bengal's 24-year-old communist government a tough fight in the assembly polls.

Banerjee had left freight rates for essential goods such as sugar, edible salt, grains and pulses, edible oils, kerosene, fruit and vegetables and cooking gas untouched.

She said rising passenger volumes would make up for the cap in fares in the railway budget which the Asian Age newspaper described as a "Vote-For-Me Budget".

While newspapers attacked her for not raising subsidised passenger fares, Railway Board chairman Ashok Kumar was quoted on Monday as saying that fares may be reviewed during the year.

Apart from the media, opposition parties too tore into the railway budget, saying Banerjee was playing populist politics ahead of the assembly elections.

"It is absolutely irresponsible. She has politicised the budget, relegating to the background the need for sober appraisal of the pathetic condition of the railway finances," said Nilotpal Basu, chief whip for the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the Rajya Sabha.

Railway Budget 2001-2002
Budget 2001
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