"We need money" to ensure the viability of rail services, the Railway Board chairman, Vinay Mittal, argued at a presentation recently.
Indeed, Mr Anand, the former Railway Board chairman, blames the awards of the fifth such commission, for messing up the railways' finances.
R.K. Singh, chairman of the Railway Board, boasts of an even better performance in the first half of this year, with an increase of 18m tonnes.
Consequently, carriage by railways is now regulated by the contract between the Railway Board and the shipper or other contracting party, as laid down in the Book of the Rules of British Railways.
It means that Indian Railways should start divesting itself of "non-core" activities, such as catering and manufacturing; that it should cut staff numbers drastically; that its top management, a seven-member Railway Board, should shed its conflicting responsibilities as regulator, policymaker and boss; and that it should start producing intelligible accounts.
IN THE early 1900s, when Britain ruled India, the chairman of the colony's Railway Board, Sir Frederick Upcott, was so sceptical about Tata, then a young steel company, that he declared he would "eat every pound of steel rail" that it could produce to Britain's exacting specifications.
"The railway board is extremely inward looking," he said.
Anti-collision devices are used worldwide in rail road systems and signaling has to be linked with this," says the former chairman Railway Board official.
"The turnaround of the Railways was actually set in motion by Nitish Kumar who carried out substantial asset replacement which helped the succeeding Lalu administration move more goods on the track," says R. Sivadasan, former member of the railway board.
On March 9, Rutherford gave notice of a resolution to strike a provincial railway board, with a membership of Rutherford, Deputy Public Works Minister John Stocks, and provincial railway engineer R. W. Jones.
