Daily Times

Pakistan Railways (PR) is set to increase fares of all passenger trains from 10 to 30 percent to shore up its revenues. The current proceeds of PR constitute roughly one-eight of its expenditure. It has to rely on the taxpayers’ money to meet the rest of it its finances. Although the decision to raise fares has some justification because increase in fuel prices since 2008, when fares were last increased, partly accounts for the yawning gap between revenues and expenses of PR, but the Rs 2.332 billion thus generated would still not cover the entire expenditure of Rs 4.043 billion. However, expecting the government to fund this deficit on a permanent basis, as chairman of the National Assembly Standing Committee on Pakistan Railways seemed to suggest, is irrational. The standing committee has made a unanimous recommendation to the government to provide Rs 11.1 billion bailout package to PR, citing the example of India, which consistently injected money into its railways department for eight years before it stopped making losses. In a country like Pakistan, where the best of blueprints to bring the PR back on track have been lost in the mire of corruption, agreeing to this recommendation would be akin to throwing good money after bad. This department has, for a long time now, been considered a goldmine by the corrupt and there is no sign of any change. Without overhauling PR, new injections of taxpayers’ hard-earned money will disappear in the same sinkhole it went in the past years.

Pakistan inherited one of the best railways infrastructure and service from the British at the time of independence, but lack of proper maintenance and upgrading of the railways network, coupled with corruption and mismanagement over the decades, has brought it to its current level, where PR does not even have sufficient number of locomotives to run its various train services. Also, despite surfacing of big scams in land management and bad deals concerning the purchasing of new locomotives, nobody has been taken to task. Railways officials of successive governments have minted money and left without even a scratch, emboldening others to follow suit. It is imperative to clean up the Augean stables of PR before hoping that injecting more money will bring any improvement in its working. *