{"id":465050,"date":"2022-01-31T11:23:52","date_gmt":"2022-01-31T05:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/?p=465050"},"modified":"2022-01-31T11:23:52","modified_gmt":"2022-01-31T05:53:52","slug":"a-different-track-indian-railways-puts-profit-over-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/a-different-track-indian-railways-puts-profit-over-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"A different track: Indian Railways puts profit over politics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the run-up to the Union budget, several members of Parliament still frequent the Rail Bhawan. One of their strident demands is a survey for a new railway line in their constituency. The survey is the starting point of a new project. It does not need a big budget but manages to send a political message of development among the constituents. As the Indian Railways continues to call the shots on technical matters even after ceding its financial autonomy in 2017 \u2014 when the railway budget was merged with the Union budget \u2014 MPs don\u2019t go to the North Block with a railway proposal as the finance ministry only puts the finishing touches to the paragraphs relating to railways that figure in the budget speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the run-up to the Union budget, several members of Parliament still frequent the Rail Bhawan. One of their strident demands is a survey for a new railway line in their constituency. The survey is the starting point of a new project. It does not need a big budget but manages to send a political message of development among the constituents. As the Indian Railways continues to call the shots on technical matters even after ceding its financial autonomy in 2017 \u2014 when the railway budget was merged with the Union budget \u2014 MPs don\u2019t go to the North Block [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,258,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465050","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-railways-the-economic-times","category-the-economic-times"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465050\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/infralive.com\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}