Utkal Express derailment: How railway minister let senior officials off the hook
Minister of railways Suresh Prabhu may have expressed profound grief and deep regret over the most recent accident in Muzaffarnagar which left 23 dead and over 150 wounded. But this was not the first time he was doing so. It was for the 27th time in three years since he was entrusted with the reins of the all-important rail ministry that he was condoling the death of rail accident victims - as if to say it was some kind of a routine exercise.
In order to make it a bit different from any perfunctory affair, he chose to add something new to the ritual – “action” against some top officials, who were stated to be invariably going scot-free in similar cases. That surely made headlines everywhere as top spokesman of the ruling dispensation went about claiming it to be “unprecedented”.
What went unnoticed was the fact that Railway Board’s member (engineering) AK Mittal – an ex-officio secretary to the government of India – who was told to proceed on leave, is due to retire from service in the next 10 days on August 31. Likewise, the general manager (Northern Railways) RK Kulshreshtha, who was also “punished” with “forced leave” is scheduled to leave for an official trip to the US in the next five days.
That has exposed the minister’s eyewash in the name of "severe action against top officials for the first time". Some describe it as a convenient escape route that the minster has given to these officials while making it seem like some exemplary step. But logically speaking, this also gives an escape route to the minister, who was desperate to shirk the moral responsibility of not just one but as many as 27 rail accidents in which more than 180 human lives had been lost.
The resignation by the late Lal Bahadur Shastri as railways minister in the early 1960s over a single rail mishap now seems a like a fable. Today, the minister’s instant move was to look for scapegoats who were systematically also given safe escape routes.
Evidently, the minister was not only absolving himself of all moral responsibility for the accident, but also his blue-eyed railway board chairman AK Mittal (same name as the member), whom he had also got an extension of two years. Prabhu’s special preference for Mittal came to the fore when he broke all conventions and took the unprecedented decision to handpick him as the first-ever officer from Indian Railways Stores Service to head the country’s largest public undertaking.
The decision was seen in railway circles as akin to a Chief of Army Staff being picked up from the non-combat wings like Ordnance or the Army Service Corps. The Indian Railways Stores Service is also one of the allied service wings of the Indian Railways, dealing solely with materials management. It has very little to do with the overall functioning of the organisation, which is basically run by members of the traffic or engineering services.
No one knows what special merit the minister saw in the stores service officer whom he not only gave the overall command of the country’s largest public undertaking but also granted him a two-year extension.
The stories doing rounds in railway circles say that Prabhu is very fond of "yes men" and Mittal ideally fits that bill. Therefore, responsibility for the series of accidents could neither be fixed on the chairman nor owned up by the minister. It had to be fixed on someone else; but here too they goofed up - not realising that ordering an officer to proceed on leave barely 10 days before his superannuation would obviously look silly and meaningless.
In any case, “forced leave” does not figure anywhere as a form of punishment under the government’s laid down service conduct rules or disciplinary proceedings. But in a regime of “yes minister”, there is little that one can do.