Where will the money come from? The Union Finance Minister has already been talking of a harsh budget implying thereby that the axe will fall obviously on the poor. The Railways may expect a maximum allocation of around Rs.2,500 crores in the General Budget and the Railway will have to mobilize internal resources to the tune of Rs. 2,600 crores. Market loans will provide an estimated Rs. 2,500 crores. Yet there will be an unbridged gap of Rs. 1,400 crores.

So the Railways will have to resort to a stiff hike in passenger fares as the Railway Minister in the context of a decelerating economy, has little elbowroom to increase freight rates. The current year's freight projections have already gone awry. With increase in freight rates, traders and industry houses have switched over to road transport. Of course, freight traffic has gone down alarmingly, so if the Railways want to remain afloat, the major portion of the unbridged gap of Rs. 14000 crores will come from increased passenger fare. Informed sources maintain that it is well-night impossible to reach the freight traffic of 450 million tons projected in the current year's Railway budget. These sources however admit that they cannot understand why there will be a shortfall in collection of passenger fare when the number of passengers have been increasing year after year despite dwindling passenger amenities even after hike in passenger fares at high rates. Suburban, trains are overcrowded and the services are deteriorating. How then will the Railways justify increase in passenger fares in suburban trains, ordinary classes in long distance and second class air-conditioned classes of any trains? But the 'non-performing' BJP-led government slowly but inexorably veering to the view that passenger fares will have to be raised to fleece the common people.

There is talk of gauge conversion, of doubling the tracks and maintenance of essential plants. Railway officials wonder why such colossal loss of revenue of Rs. 1,000 crores in the current fiscal. Probably this will be the highest figure of deficit in the past few decades. At the same breath they point out infructuous expenditure amounting to crores of rupees. A timely intervention at the political level would have saved a few hundred crores of rupees no doubt. They refer to the Railway Minister Mr. Nitish Kumar's visit to Patna more than a dozen times by special trains in just eleven months. Each visit costs more than Rs. 5 lakh. His predecessors from Bihar as Railway Ministers had discarded the practice long ago. Not only does Mr. Kumar travel by special train he takes a retinue of officers everytime creating dislocation in the work too. In fact work in the Danapur division in Bihar comes to a standstill with so many high railway officials accompanying the Minister being at the spot. There were 20 major and 39 minor accidents in the Danapur division of the Eastern Railway in 1998. Payment of huge compensation to the families of the accident victims, damages to coaches and tracks, huge expenditure on the ostensible reason for modernisation and upgrading of maintenance work all have contributed to heavy loss, in the Railways. A mid-year appraisal could have saved a portion of the loss. And in the coming budget the BJP's target is the poor passengers.

The Railway Budget will be placed in the Lok Sabha on February 25. As if rising from a deep slumber, the Railway Board has issued a secret circular to all the zonal railways directing them to stop all recruitments. Panels for recruitment will either have to be cancelled or kept in abeyance. Even recruitment on compassionate grounds of around 3,000 people will not materialise. Railways which employ the maximum number of people will henceforth stop all recruitments. It is however not known if Ms. Mamata Banerjee who champions her 'Bengal Package' and happens to be the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the Railways knows the secret circular of the Railways banning all future recruitments. The Vajpayee government has in all practical purposes stopped recruitment of around 25,000 people in the Railways which had been an annual feature. And existing vacancies numbering about 3 lakhs will remain unfilled shrinking thereby the job opportunities in the Indian Railways in the foreseeable future.