railway budget

Railway Budget 2010 – I’m sorry we didn’t cover it earlier. I hope you understand because just like the rest of India, we too were watching  Sachin Tendulkar hammer the South Africans by belting the first double hundred in the history of One Day Cricket!

And after the full on explosion provided by Sachin, it took one whole day to recover from the magnitude of what we witnessed in Gwalior. Sachin Tendulkar’s innings totally ‘pwned’ Mamata Banerjee’s Rail Budget!

Better late than never but, here is The India Street’s review of the 2010 Indian Union Railway Budget.

Presenting her second rail Budget, Mamata Banerjee the loudmouth from West Bengal has made her focus clear.

This is an extremely important week for India. A new session in Parliament has begun appropriately titled the Budget session. On the 26^th of this month,the end of the working week, Pranab Mukherjee, India’s Finance Minister will present the Union Budget. Two days earlier on the 24^th,Mamata Banerjee will present the Railway Budget.

So here at The India Street,we’re gearing up for a pretty busy week. We will be bringing reviews of both Budgets right here. With less than a week to go what exactly does this Union Budget intend to achieve?

When we reviewed the fiscal Budget in July 09, we weren’t too impressed with it. It was a lopsided almost boring and very stagnant Budget. Not high on ideas and very little reform.

This article isn’t a wish list of what we’d want to see in the Budget. The Finance Ministry is all about balancing politics with economics and almost always we see politics win even if it’s at the cost of sound economic decisions.

Mamata Banerjee’s first Railway Budget was presented today without too much pomp or show. The sort of entertainment that we have seen from the former Rail Minister Lalu Yadav was noticeably missing and definitely missed.

The woman personally responsible for the shifting of the Tata Nano project from West Bengal to Gujarat has delivered a Railways Budget that can at best be classified as ‘neither here nor there’. An average Budget – not very commercial or economically minded but balanced by its populist and socialist nature.