New Delhi: The Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) – a special fund created by the Narendra Modi government in 2017 to improve railway safety – was misused to buy foot massagers, crockery, electrical appliances, furniture, winter jackets, computers and escalators, develop gardens, build toilets, pay salaries and bonuses and erect a flag, the Telegraph reported.The details were revealed in an audit report on ‘derailments in the Indian Railways’, submitted by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in December 2022, the report said.“A random audit scrutiny of 11,464 vouchers over four select months – December 2017, March 2019, September 2019 and January 2021 – pertaining to a 48-month period from 2017-18 to 2020-21 and covering two chosen divisions of each zonal railway revealed ‘incorrect bookings of expenditure’ worth Rs 48.21 crore under the safety fund,” the newspaper reported.While unveiling the scheme, then finance minister Arun Jaitley had said: “For passenger safety, a Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh will be created with a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore over a period of five years. Besides seed capital from the government, the railways will arrange the balance resources from their own revenues and other sources.”The fund should have received Rs 20,000 crore each year. Of this, the Union government was expected to put in Rs 15,000 crore in the form of gross budgetary support and the remaining Rs 5,000 crore was supposed to come out of the railways’ internal resources.However, the CAG report says the RRSK was always poorly funded.“Over a four-year period, the railways were supposed to stump up Rs 20,000 crore. But all they could provide was Rs 4,225 crore – leaving a shortfall of Rs 15,775 crore in their contribution, or 78.9%,” the daily said.Also read: Cover Your Tracks: The Modi Government’s Attitude After the Balasore TragedyThe Telegraph also noted that the information may never have become public if it weren’t for the triple-train accident last week in Odisha’s Balasore. Nearly 300 people died and more than 900 people were injured in a triple train collision on the evening on June 2.The CAG report observed that the shortfall in funds had defeated the primary objective of creation of the RRSK to support absolute safety in Railways.The report further said that officials were spending money on ‘inconsequentials’. The share of non-priority works under the RRSK grew from 2.76% in 2017-18 to 6.36% in 2019-20.“In absolute numbers, Rs 1,004 crore was spent under this head in 2019-20 flouting clear guidelines on how funds under the RRSK, announced in the central budget of 2017-18, were to be spent,” the newspaper added.In addition, civil engineering works, which include track renewals, come under priority-1 work under the RRSK. It was supposed to have a corpus of Rs 119,000 crore. But it was cut down to Rs 1 lakh crore, it added.The fund allocation for track renewals also declined from Rs 9,607.65 crore in 2018-19 to Rs 7,417 crore in 2019-20.
