Railways giving stepmotherly treatment to State.

Express Buzz; N R Madhusudhan; Tuesday, April 12, 2011,

BANGALORE: Although the Railways has sanctioned many new trains to Karnataka in the past three years, its stepmotherly approach in allocating funds to the projects continues.

The funds allocated for the projects in the state have drastically decreased in the past three years. According to the information obtained through an RTI application, the allocation of funds for the projects in the state has reduced by more than 35 per cent since 200809.

In 200809, the Railway Board had allocated Rs 466 crore for various projects in South-Western Railways (SWR) and in the subsequent year, the state received Rs 350 crore. In the past financial year, Rs 282 crore were received for all the projects including the cost-sharing ones undertaken in the SWR. As a result, the Railways has failed to utilise even the funds allocated by the state government for the cost-sharing projects.

According to the sources, the Railways could utilise only Rs 140 crore of the Rs 600 crore allocated by the state government in the past financial year. Therefore, the state government reduced its allocation for various cost sharing projects from Rs 600 crore in the last financial year to Rs 480 crore in this financial year.

West Bengal favoured

However, the allocation has increased drastically to West Bengal during the same period. In 200809, the Railways had allocated Rs 270 crore to the Central Railway Zone, which controls the railway operations of West Bengal, from where Union Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee hails. In the subsequent year, the Eastern Railways got Rs 416 crore.

In 201011, the Railways allocated Rs 788 crore to the Eastern Railways, nearly three times more than what was allocated to the zone in 200809. In fact, Kolkata Metro has got more funds in the last year than the entire SWR. The Railways allocated Rs 570 crore for the Kolkata Metro in 201011, which is Rs 288 crore more than that was allocated to the SWR.

FKCCI President N S Srinivas Murthy said: "According to the experts, at least `12,000 crore is needed to complete all the projects in the state and Rs 282 crore is just a pittance. If the present trend continues, it might take a few decades to complete all the projects in the state. The state has been discriminated from the past 40 years and now we are receiving less funds despite the fact that Union Minister of State for Railways K H Muniyappa is from our state."