Mamata train disaster

You have to hand it to Mamata Banerjee, even while threatening to severe ties with the UPA, her nominee railway minister (Dinesh Trivedi) has no compunction in petitioning the finance ministry for R10,000 crore so the people’s politician doesn’t spoil her track record by raising passenger fares. Since previous bailout requests have been rejected, Trivedi wants a permanent corpus to help build select projects—that will allow him to lower capital spending!—since “a sick Railways will hurt the country’s GDP growth aspirations” (a healthy Railways, he says, can add another 2 percentage points to GDP growth).

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