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EDITORIALS
Switching
Tracks
The options before Mamata: Railway Inc or Railway sink
Depending on how
you choose to look at it, Mamata Banerjee's railway budget is either the
ultimate in munificence or an unmitigated disaster. For the second successive
year passenger fares have not been raised. Instead, there is a 3 per cent
increase on already high freight rates. In short, the commuter's easy
ride has not been interrupted. With seven of the 24 new trains beginning
their journey in her home state, Mamata's budget is quite obviously a
West Bengal election manifesto. The lady may or may not win a majority
in the next assembly. The point is, Indian Railways will be in trouble
regardless.
What is the assumption behind Mamata's accountancy?
Simply put, it is that increment in expenditure will be met not by raising
fares but by "other earnings". Fair enough, it could be argued.
India is a poor country, the railway network-even though at 81,000 km
the total running track is only about a quarter more than what the British
left behind-is the only affordable distance link for a majority of the
people. Every year, 4.5 billion people-four Indias-use Mamata's trains.
Their capacity to pay can never match user cost and a subsidy is inherent.
This has to be defrayed by an innovative management: one that rents out
the vast properties of Indian Railways, privatises services such as catering
or maintenance of stations and decides that its primary duty is not to
create wasteful employment. Has this happened? In 2000-01, the commercial
exploitation of the railways' optic fibre system was supposed to be the
key to "other earnings". Over the past year Rail Tel, the subsidiary
agency created for the job, has become yet another parasitic bureaucracy.
Mamata's real failure is not her sense of "fare play". Rather,
it is her inability to provide Indian Railways the audacious leadership
it requires.
Barbarians at the Gate
The Taliban's vandalism will hurt India-and all
mankind
To the rest of
the world, the destruction of the Buddhist shrine in Bamiyan, 150 km from
Kabul, represents another assault by the Taliban on civilisation. In India,
the smashing up of the two statues-at 53 m, one of them is the world's
tallest standing Buddha-will perhaps be taken more personally. They are
among the few surviving structures from a part of the world that was once
India but is now lost to it; forever. Posterity will see the Taliban's
vandalism-the Buddhist relics are being targeted because they are "unIslamic"-as
an act of particular infamy. The Bamiyan statues were carved out of steep
cliffs in A.D. 622, around the time Arab invaders ravaged the great library
of Alexandria, incinerating, legend has it, the last remaining copy of
Megasthenes' Indica. What is happening in Afghanistan is scarcely different.
Historically Afghanistan was a repository of
Buddhist and, later, Shaivite art and tradition. The effacement of this
heritage is not merely a concern for India's revanchists. It is a rape
of mankind's collective legacy. As the Pakistan-based Society for Preservation
of Afghanistan's Heritage has sedulously recorded, the civil war has done
irreparable harm to archaeological sites. From a Buddhist stupa in central
Kabul to 15th century Islamic minarets in Herat, little has been spared.
Till the mid-1990s, the Kabul Museum housed 1,00,000 artefacts and was
among the most important treasuries of, well, Indology. Today only 20
per cent of this collection is traceable. The rest, it is feared, has
either been destroyed or smuggled through Pakistan to buyers in Japan
and the West. It may take decades but surely tranquillity will some day
descend on Afghanistan. Till then history is at the mercy of the pillaging
Taliban.
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