Union Budget 2024: A Quick Snippet of the Merger of Railways Budget

When the Union Budget 2024 will be announced next month, one sector that would be keenly watched by experts and commoners alike is the allocation of resources to the Railways sector. Every year, a substantial portion of the Union Budget is doled out to the Railways sector to bolster its infrastructure, growth and revenue building capabilities.Indian Railways is home to the fourth largest railway network in the world. With an average of 13 thousand trains operating on a daily basis, nearly 24 million passengers travel every day in addition to 203.88 million tonnes of freight transported across the subcontinent. It is a colossal employment provider globally with a workforce of over 1.3 million individuals. India’s railway network is recognised as one of the largest railway systems in the world under a single management.In the Fiscal Year 2023-24, the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated Rs 2,40,000 crore for the Railways. This was estimated to be approximately nine times the amount spent in the Fiscal year 2013-14. In the Interim Budget that followed in February this year, Rs 2,52,200 crore was allocated 2024-25 which was a 5.8 percent increase from the previous budgetary estimate.Unlike the present day scenario, the Budget for the Indian Railways in its preceding years was presented separately from the General Budget.In 1920, the ‘East Indian Railway Committee’ constituted under the chairmanship of Sir William Acworth recommended the consolidation and nationalisation of the Indian Railways. The recommendations of the committee sought to separate the Finances of the Railways from the General Budget. Hence from 1924 onwards, the Railways were presented as a separate budget. This tradition continued even after Independence, when India’s first Railway minister John Matthai presented the Railway Budget in 1947.Read: Google to Buy 300 Megawatts of Green Energy from BlackRock-Backed Taiwanese Firm

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