Private players want to run the railways with as few employees as possible, with as little investment as possible, they want to get the best assets of railways at throw away prices.

AS OF TODAY, Indian Railways has 3.5 lakh openings. One must wonder why these posts have not been filled. With unemployment hitting an all-time high, this would have provided careers to 3.5 lakh people and given succor to 15-20 lakh people. A little research and asking around resulted in the following findings:

One of Railway’s biggest expenditures is salaries and pensions. So, they end up saving 1000s of crores by not hiring for 3.5 lakh vacant posts. These 1000s of crores are now being wasted on Vanity projects, the favorite of the Government’s strategy.

The vanity projects are the stations being redeveloped to look swanky and the Vande Bharat trains. The reason is simple, the public simple minded. It is easy to fool people by faking development through Vanity projects like the Stations and the Vande Bharat trains.

They are doing this at the expense of the desperate investment needed in hiring people to run the railways, upgradation on tracks and laying new tracks, but why do all that when people can be fooled with vanity real estate developments and events like the inauguration of Vande Bharat trains.

Railways has some 1.8 million employees; their salaries and pension make it very enterprise to maintain and only a publicly funded entity like the Government has the finances for such a large bill.

However, we know that the Current government favors selling national assets to raise capital. Couple this with the fact that private players won’t fund a not-for-profit enterprise like the railways, the Government needs to make it lean and mean and cheap to operate and milk profits.

Private players want to run the railways with as few employees as possible, with as little investment as possible, they want to get the best assets of railways at throw away prices. That’s why its best assets, the freight trains and passenger trains are being sold, along with the vanity railways projects like its stations.

If Railways is not destroyed like ONGC or the BSNL, then there will be no case for selling its skeleton to BJP’s crony funders at throw away prices, and this includes the biggest land bank in India, which Railways desperately wants to monetize to raise funds for expansion.

Vande Bharat Express, the source of much ridicule and cow deaths, runs at average speeds lower than the fastest trains of India like the Rajdhanis and Shatabdis. Vande Bharat’s speed is an illusion created by slowing down other trains, it is literally that easy to fool the bhakts.

Only Sanghis can be dumb enough to design a train that can run at 160 kmph before they lay down tracks and install the signaling system to support that.

Instead, Vande Bharat is a pure vanity project, so that the Dear Leader can show his face in public occasionally, with our North Korean Media making a spectacle out of each one of the flag-offs.

Otherwise, if you think about it, Dear Leader’s outings are associated with rabble rousing, and hate filled speeches.

He wants to fake ‘Vikas’ and he has nothing other than this scam of Vande Bharat to fool his core electorate with. If not for the opportunity to fake ‘Vikas’, the Government would not have developed this train in the first place.

Another massive vanity project that will cost the nation dearly is the Bullet Train. It is a colossal waste of borrowed money and huge burden on the next three generations of Indians. Those who have read the numbers of feasibility know that the train is financially unfeasible.

Travel on this Bullet Train will cost the public more than flying. It is a pure vanity project entirely dedicated to Vanity of the Naked Emperor, much like the Statue of Sardar.

Now let us do a reality check. Even if you look at the simple things like Food, a recent CAG report showed that since the privatization of catering, the food served on the train has been found unfit for human consumption. The Government has done nothing about it.

A report submitted to the Government also clearly showed that the safety system and infrastructure needed like relaying old tracks and expanding the existing network was so poor that an accident like the one we are suffering now was waiting to happen. The Government has done nothing about it.

Kavach, anti- collision system was originally developed when Mamata Banerjee headed the Railways. As he always does, the Dear Leader only changed the name and stole the credit. The railway minister then on the floor of Parliament lied about it, claiming Kavach was visionary idea of the Dear Leader, in a desperate effort to steal the credit.

The reality is that Kavach needs an investment of 1 lakh crore. But after exploiting it for much needed publicity, The Government released less than 500 crores of the total requirement of 1,00,000 crores needed for the deployment.

Kavach, embarrassingly covers only 1500 kms of total rail track of India, which is less than 2%. More money has been spent on the PR of it, to fake ‘Vikas’. It reminded me of the Beti Bachao scam, where 80% of the money for the scheme was used for its Advertising and PR.

Government has laid only 5000 kms of new track in the last 9 years, whereas the requirement is something like 25,000 KMS. This failure has been sold to us as a mega success by our North Korean Media.

Instead, a lot of money has been wasted on doing publicity campaigns, like creating social media handles and pushing Railways achievements as Dear Leader’s achievements on daily basis.

Loads of money is wasted on the content creation for the several handles Railways now operates on several social media platforms. Do remember that each flagging off that he does in person, an event of gigantic proportions, costs the taxpayer 25-30 crores.

At the end of the day, due to the failing economy, the loss of revenue from corporate tax cuts, the debt write-off of 11 lakh crore of the NPAs, the rations for 88 crores which costs the nation 8 lakh crore a year, and their many failures has left the economy in tatters.

This also applies to the railways, and just like in other public funded enterprises, this situation also presents the vultures with the best opportunity to pick apart the carcass of Indian Railways.

The Sangh obviously in an quid pro quo agreement with its cronies to destroy the railways from within, make it worthless, and then sell it at throw away prices to its funders and sell its best parts to its closest allies.

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