When she presented her first budget as a minister in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government last year, Railway Minister and Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee had announced a record number of infrastructure projects.
Her next budget, to be tabled in the coming month, would require a lot of funds to actually kickstart these projects as the financial allotments for these projects so far have been negligible.
While the estimated project costs run into hundreds of crores of rupees, the railway minister has uniformly allotted just Rs 1 lakh for most of these projects. In her supplementary demands for grants, she allotted Rs 10,000 each to these projects.
Projects which have received just token financial allotments include many in her own state, West Bengal. So Banerjee, who is eyeing the 2011 Assembly elections for the chief ministership, has announced a bonanza for the state that she has not backed up with funds.
A 28-km line doubling project has an anticipated cost of Rs 137.56 core but the Budget allotment was Rs 1 lakh. Banerjee added Rs 10,000 in her supplementary demands for grants passed in Parliament last month.
A third line between Dankuni and Liluah (anticipated cost Rs 80 crore), manning of unmanned level crossings of Eastern Railway (Rs 16 crore), public address system in EMUs in Kolkata area (Rs 16.07 crore), Kolkata Metro Railway’s rake rehabilitation facility (Rs 69.61 crore) and two projects of EMD type and Phase-3 locomotives with sub-assemblies from Dankuni (total Rs 1,700 crore) are some other projects that received similar treatment from Banerjee.
Outside Bengal, the unreserved ticketing system at 2,000 post offices in northern India (Rs 120.24 crore), Daund-Gulbarga line doubling and Pune Guntakal electrification (Rs 1,437.79 crore), Banspani-Jakhapura line doubling (Rs 1,142.60 crore), manning of unmanned level crossings of Western Railway (Rs 96 crore) and integrated security system at Chennai (Rs 90 crore) received just Rs 1 lakh to begin work during Banerjee’s first year as the UPA’s railway minister.
Altogether, at least 40 projects with cumulative anticipated cost of more than Rs 5,000 crore have received just Rs 40 lakh as Budget allocation and around Rs 4 lakh in Banerjee’s supplementary demands for grants.
CPI(M)’s Basudeb Acharia, who headed the Parliamentary Standing Committee of Railway earlier, said: “In her ‘White Paper’, she has announced no new project can be taken up. To complete the pending projects the minister would require Rs 1 lakh crore.”
