The Indian Railway,once the country’s most profitable public sector is now on its knees pleading to the finance ministry to help support its payroll.The Railways cannot meet its pension expenditure of Rs 53,000 crores for 2020-21, and urged North Block to take some of its pension liability for this fiscal year.
The Railways is still the nations largest employer with 13 lakh employees and roughly 15 lakh pensioners.
The Railway has called for an urgent supension of all infrastructure deveopment projects.The red flags were raised by the railway ministry at a meeting, called by officials of the Prime Minister’s Office with top officials of Central ministries to take stock of the infrastructure sector.
Reliable sources said the PMO was notified of the fact that even in 2019-20, that has just ended, the railway ministry could not supplement the same amount (Rs 53,000 crores) in its pension fund, which had left it with a huge negative closing balance of around Rs -28,000 crores.
The negative balance sheet of the Railways may be a setback to the Centre’s ambitious plan to create big ticket infrastructure projects in the next five years, for which it plans to entail an expenditure of Rs 102 lakh crores under the National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) till 2024.
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