New day. New demands for a bailout. This time around, it’s the Pakistan Railways. The sound of chugging you hear is not of a PR engine but of the PR chugging oodles of money. With a loss to the tune of 80 billion and already having been given one bailout in January, it is nowhere near carrying its weight. It’s too much of a cash-guzzler to be viable for the government but it’s too critical to be abandoned.
This is a problem that you just can’t throw money at. Give it a bailout today and it will be back for more later. What is needed is a complete retooling of its structure. Declining revenue is an issue but generating demand for cheap transportation should not be a problem. The real rub lies elsewhere. Corruption, inefficiency, mismanagement: we’ve heard these buzzwords so many times that they’ve lost meaning. But these are the meaningful terms when it comes to this crisis.
PR could possibly hold the ignominious mantle of being the most corrupt institution in the country – and in Pakistan, that is saying a lot. According to the Auditor General’s report, the organisation lost almost 4 billion rupees to corrupt practices last year. Be it pilferage of equipment, kickbacks in buying of locomotives and contaminated oil, squandering fortunes on prime real estate or ticket-less travel, these things are adding up to PR’s woes. Mismanagement is also a scourge. From gross overstaffing (much of it due to political interference) to genius moves like buying unsuitable trains for our tracks, it is afflicted with every managerial crisis. To top it off, the floods haven’t been kind to its infrastructure. It is one unholy melange.
Privatising it in its current state will just transfer the woes to the private sector. It’s not the market’s logic that is needed here but plain simple logic. Any efficient management could turn things around. There’s a lot that can be done right off the bat: shutting down non-core operation such as operation of far-flung dispensaries, selling a few of its assets, streamlining the organisation. But nothing short of an overhaul will help it in the long run. After it has been restructured, options like generating international investment, setting up international trade routes to India, Iran and Afghanistan etc can be worked on. A working rail system is important to the economy and to the people. Let’s hope it’s not too derailed to be put back on track.