Andhra Pradesh - Visakhapatnam   

‘Need yardstick for new rly. facilities’

Yogendra Pal Anand

VISAKHAPATNAM: It all depends on people’s representatives for a State or an area to get the required railway facilities, said former Chairman of Railway Board Yogendra Pal Anand.

“If the people‘s representatives feel the need and if a Chief Minister really feels, he will get it (the railway facilities for the State)

. Cost factor is nothing”, he said in a chat with The Hindu on Thursday.

The former Railway Board Chairman is a Gandhian and also a former Director of the National Gandhi Museum in New Delhi.

He is in the city to deliver lectures at the programmes organised by Andhra University’s New Gandhian Studies Centre.

There is no procedure or written rules to be followed in sanctioning new trains, railway lines and projects and the sanction depends mostly on the need, he said.

But where there is a real need the requests from the States are met.

Dr. Yogendra Pal Anand initiated gauge conversion on a large scale when he was Member (engineering) of the Railway Board and recalled that the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao had not wasted any time in accepting the proposal when he explained to him the details along with the then Railway Minister Jaffer Sharriff.

Later Dr. Anand became Chairman of the Railway Board.

Gauge conversion was taking place earlier on a small scale but he planned and started executing conversion of 1,200 km of track a year. The total length of the track to be converted then was about 10,000 km.

The cost of the project was estimated at Rs.75 lakhs to less than Rs.1 crore for a kilometre of track.

There was not much difference in the running of railways then and now, said Dr. Anand, who retired in 1992. On the indirect way of getting revenue through tatkal, additional berth on aisle side, etc., the former Railway Board Chairman said the Governments being weak know (not a single party but a group of parties coming together to run the Government), they could not raise the money directly and these methods had to be adopted.

He also pointed out that passenger traffic would always bring loss and freight traffic gets profit. Hence the passenger traffic was always cross-subsidised. The income from Tatkal, etc. was only a fraction of the Railway income, he added.

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