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House panel paints grim picture of rly finances

Says railways will spend more than its earnings this fiscal
Last Updated 03 December 2016, 19:14 IST
A Parliamentary panel has painted a grim picture of railway finances saying the growth it had achieved was solely on account of benign prices of high speed diesel. It said the transporter, this fiscal, would spend more than what it would earn.

The Railway Convention Committee, in its report to Parliament, has highlighted a steady decline in freight loading and passenger traffic since 2013-14, which has led to the Railways missing the budgetary targets it had set on the two counts for successive years.

The committee observed that due to the drop in prices of high speed diesel for traction during 2013-14, the Railways had reported savings of Rs 2,974 crore over the revised estimates. In addition, the savings on pension expenditure to the tune of Rs 646 crore had led to an improvement in the operating ratio to 91.3%, which was better than the last target.

For 2014-15, the total freight loading for the Railways was 1,095.26 million tonnes (MT), which was 5.99 MT less than the 1,101.25 MT target set in the revised estimates (RE). As a result, the freight earnings fell short of the RE target of Rs 1.06 lakh crore by about Rs 1,136 crore.

Passenger traffic also witnessed a decline. As against the RE target of 8,350 million, the actual originating passengers fell to 8,224.12 million, thus showing a negative growth of 2.1% over 2013-14. As a result, the passenger earnings fell short of the RE target by Rs 812 crore. For the year 2015-16, the growth trends lagged in all segments of earnings except for other coaching.

The committee, chaired by BJD leader B Mahtab, said it was given to understand that during April-September 2016, both freight loading and passenger booking/traffic have gone down compared to the corresponding period of last year.

It observed that the total earnings for the first half of the current financial year were expected to fall short of the target by 12,400 crore leading to the shooting up of the operating ratio to 114%.

The committee observed that the savings on account of benign HSD prices may not be sufficient to offset the losses on account of falling passenger and freight revenues.
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(Published 03 December 2016, 19:14 IST)

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