The railway budget presented by Mamata Banerjee on Friday reflected her politics. She extended a bounty of new projects and trains to her home state, West Bengal, and gave Bihar, the home state of former railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, a miss.
Banerjee gave Bengal a power plant, a rail coach factory and four of the 12 new long-distance, non-stop trains, but none for Bihar, which got no new rail line either. Of the 309 stations identified to be developed as 'adarsh' (model) stations, 142 are in West Bengal. Banerjee proposes to modernise three stations in and around Kolkata (Howrah, Sealdah and Kolkata) to world-class standards, but Patna doesn’t figure in the 50 on this latter list.
Through her speech, Banerjee kept taking digs at Prasad or at the numbers he presented in the Interim Budget in February 2009.
She has proposed new railway lines for Singur, Nandigram and Lalgarh, the three political hotspots in West Bengal, and a 1,000-Mw power plant at Adra, next to Lalgarh. The onus of acquiring the land for the new projects is on the Left Front government in the state.
Banerjee will extend the Kolkata Metro to Barrackpore, a suburb north of the city, which is considered a CPM bastion but elected a Trinamool Congress candidate in the Lok Sabha elections. She has also appeased the state Congress unit with a new rail link between Delhi and Farakka, considered a bastion of the Congress.