Panel frowns on railway accounting practices

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI, DEC. 1. A Parliamentary committee has frowned on the accounting practices followed by the railways. Referring to a specific instance, it observed that ``this speaks volumes of the sanctity attached by the railways to the need for evolving tangible norms for allocation of capital expenditure under the respective heads''.

``Having regard to the mounting need for streamlining its accounting procedure for booking expenditure under appropriate heads in a monolith organisation like the railways with large field formations spread over the country, the committee reiterates their earlier recommendation in the hope that suitable modalities would be worked out by the railways in the near future in consultation with the statutory audit,'' noted the Public Accounts Committee report tabled today in both Houses of Parliament.

The direction to evolve ``suitable modalities'' for the allocation of capital expenditure between ``capital'' and ``capital fund'' in the 11th action taken report came after the PAC noted that during examination of the appropriate accounts of the Government for `93-94 had incurred excess expenditure of over Rs. 1,000 crores under eight grants. The excess expenditure under grant No. 16 (capital) alone accounted for most of the amount.

The railways had said that this was a technical excess in view of the matching savings in the ``capital fund'' under this grant. But the PAC felt this was a ``lackadaisical'' approach followed by the railways in working out a proper accounting procedure for booking of expenditure under two distinct heads.

Accident rate goes up

The Government today admitted in the Rajya Sabha that railway accident rate had gone up during the current financial year as compared to last year. The reason for the 25 per cent spurt was a sudden rise in derailments on the North-East Frontier Railway and more accidents at unmanned level crossings, said the Minister of State for Railways, Mr. Digvijay Singh, in a written reply to Mr. Jibon Roy, CPI(-M), during the question hour.

During the first four months of the financial year (April to July), the number of consequential train accidents increased from 125 in `99-00 to 161 in 2000-01. The main reasons were the increase in derailments on the NF railway to 38 during the first four months as compared to 12 during the corresponding period last year. Unmanned level crossing accidents went up to 23 as compared to 13, said Mr. Singh.

However, latest figures from the Ministry indicate that the trend of higher accident rate has continued. There were 43 consequential accidents in August this year as against 35 during the same month last year. The Minister said there was no decline in the major performance parameters such as the quantum of freight traffic and the number of passengers booked.

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Section  : National
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