Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s idea of presenting one consolidated budget, instead of separate railway and general budgets, may not be a revolutionary one but is certainly something that is long overdue.

That is mainly because the railways no longer constitute the larger chunk of the government expenditure. Now it is a small part of the expenditure and as such doesn't call for a separate exercise.

More compelling is the manner in which it has been reduced to a fiefdom of the minister, often belonging to a coalition partner interested only in dispensing political patronage to further his or her political career. All the railway ministers in the past decade or more have been from either Bihar or West Bengal. All big-ticket projects have, therefore, been directed at these two states at the cost of rest of the country but without any noticeable change in any of these states.

The present minister has gone a step further by directing almost the entire investment plan to her own state, using the railway protection force as her private security agency for use at her political rallies and granting a huge bonus to the employees for no justifiable reason.

Don’t you think we can bring in more accountability, a holistic approach to planning and check wayward behavior of the minister by merging the railway budget with that of the general one to make one consolidated budget for the country?