Features and Critical Analysis of the Railway Budget 2015-16 By Deepak Parvatiyar February 26, 2015 In his post budget interview, Railway minister Suresh Prabhu categorically described his budget as a “policy statement”. In these pages in July 2014, we had pointed out about how over the years expedient politics reduced the status of Railway budgets to being merely an income and expenditure account of ministry than being a vision document. (Refer to Why does India have a separate Railway Budget ). These budgets were largely relegated to the customary announcements of concessions for the ruling dispensation’s core constituencies – whether in form of introducing “unviable new trains, or fudging accounts to show surplus budget so as to accommodate un-remunerative projects, unviable schemes and cross subsidies”. Obviously, any ruling dispensation found it difficult to resist the temptation of using the Railways as a milking cow to meet their own selfish motive and he
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