On Tuesday, as he started with a flourish, quoting couplets, hemmed and hawed midway through his rail budget speech as the din rose in the opposition benches and wound up with a whimper, almost sheepishly, as fellow cabinet colleague Kamal Nath advised him to wrap up, railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal looked a bit like one those Indian Railway trains. You just cannot set predict them.

Barring that metaphorical similarity with the main element of his ministry, and his minor halt at Kinattukkadavu, as the Punjabi minister struggled to pronounce Kinattukkadavu-Podanur section while talking about gauge conversion, Podanur procrastination there was little to tell the otherwise-suave Lok Sabha MP from uber-suave Chandigarh had anything to do with a ministry that has had the likes of Mamata Banerjee, Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan, among others at its helm. All of them past masters at playing to the gallery.

Like all budget speeches, which everyone but people with a unique obsession for numbers love to check only in abbreviated news format — that budgets speeches have pretty high television ratings are a mystery as old as television itself — Bansal quoted figures in thousands of crores. Besides quoting poetry and thanking the “honourable prime minister” and the “UPA chairperson” — strictly in that order, and a record of some sorts for a Congress minister, especially on the eve of an election year — it was a revealing, if insipid speech. We zoom in on some lessons learnt from it:

1. Morning shows the day: Having started off by paying “homage to the sacred memory of Rajiv Gandhi, who introduced me to the portals of this highest temple of Indian democracy”, it was but obvious that Bansal would come to that other portal, sooner rather than later: irctc.co.in. Bansal said, “By this calendar year we will put in place a new e-ticketing system to bring about a paradigm change.”

He also said the new system would ensure that IRCTC will allow sale of 7,200 tickets per minute compared to 2,000 now and support 1.20 lakh users simultaneously against 40,000 it can support at present.

I tried to check what he was talking about and signed up. Besides the fact that it took a few minutes for the website to acknowledge the fact that I had “accepted” all it was asking me to accept before actually signing me up, it threw up identical responses to two sets of trains I wanted to test-check: Delhi-Howrah on March 21 and Delhi-Mumbai for March 26.

“Unable to retrieve due to communication failure,” I was informed. Pretty much instantly. Assuming that I am outside of the 40,000 users, and thereby not lucky enough to retrieve the information, I will have a three-time better chance of being in the blessed 1.2-lakh bracket whenever Bansal’s GenNext ticketing system is out and about. That is assuming the daily passenger traffic load of the railways does not increase from the present 3.2 crore, as Bansal had said a day after the stampede at Allahabad railway station on February 10 left nearly 40 people dead.

(Here’s what he had said: “There are a total of 12,000 trains on Indian Railway's 65,000 km long route system which carries 2.3 crore passengers in a day. So all the trains cannot reach at one spot in a day as there are limitations on the part of railways to carry crores of passengers in a given day.”)

Lesson learnt: you got to lucky, darned lucky, and start praying even before logging in to avail of Bansal’s gennext or nextgen or generally whatever is coming next. God help you if you profess to be atheist or agnostic.
 
2. Morning rarely shows the day: Not long before Bansal began his budget speech, a five-year-old boy named Mohammad Ali and his eight-year-old sister, “whose name was yet to be ascertained”, were crushed by a goods train at Gulaabganj railway station in Madhya Pradesh. The siblings died on the spot, after which irate locals set the station on fire, after which Bansal presented his budget and claimed there has been a significant drop in train mishaps.

He also rued the fact that several accidents have claimed lives of elephants in the Northeast.

While the station master was reportedly at fault in today’s case, Bansal’s astute observation, of course backed up by facts and figures, came soon afterward — and just after a fortnight of the fatal mishap at the Allahabad railway station, an incident which Bansal said “has shaken us”.

Lesson learnt: you got to lucky, darned lucky, and start praying even before crossing the tracks at stations which do not have foot-over-bridges that the station master does not ask the train to hurry up. Because the railway minister is looking hi-tech: “No new level crossings anymore. Train protection warning systems, indigenously developed train anti-collision system to be put in place,” as Bansal said in his budget speech.