'From the UP govt to highways, telecom and railways, we are all ready (for the Ram temple)'

Union Minister for Railways, Communications, Electronics Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw on regulating telecom and upgrading safety systems in Railways. This session was moderated by Deputy Editor Liz Mathew and National Business Editor Anil Sasi

ANIL SASI: With regard to the railways, there seems to be a gap between demand and supply. The passenger traffic demand is approximately to the tune of 1,100 crore annually while the supply is about 800 crore. When it comes to larger network planning, are you looking at addressing this demand-supply gap? Any country of our size requires multiple transportation modes to be developed simultaneously. Until 1950, the railways had a very dominant role in transportation. Over a period of time, since railways was an isolated organisation, with its own budget and processes, it was starved of investment.

When Atalji started the Golden Quadrilateral Project, the thought was to have a golden quadrilateral for highways and railways. Unfortunately, the investment in railways could never come.

There was a structural issue because of which railways lost out on cargo and the demand-supply gap in case of passengers became prominent.

In 2014, Modiji merged the railway budget with the general budget. From about 35,000 crore annual budgetary allocation, he has increased it to ₹2,40,000 crore. In the last 9.5 years, we've added 26,000 km of new tracks. Today we are adding new tracks at a rate of 14 km a day. Almost 94% of the network is already electrified.

ANIL SASI: There is still an element of cross-subsidy in railway fares between freight and passengers. While you have some degree of flexibility now on fares on trunk routes, the operating ratio still continues to be fairly high at 97-98%.