The Hindu : Indefensible decision

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jul 19, 2002

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Indefensible decision

Sir,— The Defence Minister, George Fernandes, has defended the wanton creation of a new railway zone based at Hajipur in Bihar, on the ground that it was a ``Cabinet decision'' and that raising a dispute over it would amount to ``challenging the democratic system.'' This argument is untenable because the so-called Cabinet decision itself was not taken in accordance with democratic norms.

The initial decision to form six new railway zones was an arbitrary one, taken by the Deve Gowda Government in 1996, soon after assumption of office. The motive behind it was quite evident from the fact that one of the new zonal offices was to be at Hajipur, the constituency of the then Railway Minister, Ramvilas Paswan, and another in Bangalore in which Mr. Gowda himself was interested. The Parliament's Standing Committee for Railways wanted the decision reviewed, but, the advice went unheeded.

After the BJP-led Government took over in 1998, the Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, decided to grant a seventh new railway zone at Bilaspur, as a gesture to the emerging new State of Chhattisgarh, which was aggrieved by the fact that the zone already approved for the region was to be based at Jabalpur which would fall in the residual State of Madhya Pradesh. What was specially noteworthy about this decision was that it was taken overruling the Railway Ministry's advice that only one of the two, either Jabalpur or Bilaspur, was justified.

It is a pity that both George Fernandes and Nitish Kumar are at pains to defend the wasteful creation of additional zones.

M.N. Prasad,

Retired Chairman,

Railway Board,

Thiruvananthapuram

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