Bibek Debroy Committee, 2015

The Railway Board had constituted a Committee for mobilization of resources for major railway projects and restructuring of Railway Ministry and Railway Board under the chair of Mr. Bibek Debroy. The Committee was constituted on September 22, 2014 and submitted its final report in June 2015.

Recommendations

• The role policy making, the regulatory function, and operations should not be vested in the same organization. Rather these three roles must be separated from each other to have sustained and large scale private participation.
• Set up an independent regulator, the Railways Regulatory Authority which will be a statutory body, with an independent budget and independent of the Ministry. It will not determine tariff, but will monitor whether the tariff is market determined and competitive.
• There is a need to restructure the zones and divisions of Indian Railways as present zones have developed historically and not from a specific strategy.
• To enable themselves to compete effectively, they will need to reduce costs on the peripheral activities such as running schools, hospitals and a police forcethat are non- remunerative in nature, and instead improve the efficiency of running trains by greater resource allocation to this function. Non-core activities can be outsourced to private entities.
• Switching to a commercial accrual-based double entry accounting system which will clearly distinguish between revenue and capital expenditures and present a complete picture of debt and other liabilities of Indian Railways.
• There is need to introduce mechanism for financial oversight of projects of Railways.
• Changes in the composition of the Railway Board.
• Bifurcation between Railway Infrastructure Corporation and rest of Indian Railways as train operators;
• End of the Railway Budget.
• Transition of the Indian Railways that operates trains to a government-owned SPV.

Most of the recommendations were accepted and outcome of which from the next year (2016) onwards the Railways Budget is subsumed in the Union Budget.