NEW DELHI: A confidante of BJP chief Amit Shah and someone who was in the good books of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Piyush Goyal replaced Suresh Prabhu as the new railway minister at a time when the safety of the national transporter has become a major concern.
Though Prabhu had offered to resign after a spate of accidents recently, Modi had asked him to stay.
For Goyal, the upgrade from minister of state with independent charge of power and coal to a Cabinet rank was certainly an acknowledgement as a performer.
For Modi, he wanted an efficient person to transform the crucial Railway Ministry given his focus on pushing infrastructure in the country. Also, the fact that millions of citizens use the vast railway network regularly necessitated that public concerns over safety be put to rest. In the past three years under Prabhu, the Railways had witnessed 346 accidents and the highest number of 193 passenger deaths in a decade in 2016-17.
That precisely is the challenge for Goyal as the cash-strapped behemoth dreams big on realising the bullet train project but struggles to ensure smooth running of passenger trains. Goyal is the third railway minister in the NDA government. Prabhu, who became railway minister in November 2014, had replaced Sadananda Gowda.
Goyal, who also holds the coal portfolio, will have to hit the ground running in the Railway Ministry and focus on steps to improve freight earnings and complete pending projects ahead of the 2019 general elections. At present, the Railways is facing a loss of Rs 36,000 crore annually due to passenger fare subsidy.
Prabhu, a chartered accountant by profession, was brought in as railway minister with expectations that he would help improve the financial health of the Railways, but under him, freight loading fell further and operating ratio jumped over 100 per cent. He did take some measures such as decentralisation of tendering powers to check corruption, setting up of non-fare revenue directorate, planning high speed and semi-high-speed trains, dynamic fare pricing, merger of the railway budget with the general budget and formation of an independent tariff authority to take a call on fare hike, among others.