Skip to main content

No dividend waiver for Railways this year(thehindu)



The Finance Ministry has rejected the Railway Ministry’s demand for waiving or deferring the payment of dividend for 2016-17, senior railway official said.

The Railways had demanded that the dividend for the divided budgeted for 2016-17 be waived or deferred owing to its poor financial condition in its mid-year review meeting held last month.

“The Finance Ministry didn't agree to our demand of not paying dividend due to weak financial position this fiscal year," a senior Indian Railways' official said, on conditions of anonymity.



After the Railway Budget merges with the Union Budget from next financial year, the Railways will not be required to pay dividend to the Finance Ministry for the capital invested in it. In 2016-17, the Railways were budgeted to pay Rs. 9,731 crore as dividend, whereas the subsidy claimed by the Railways towards loss-making routes was estimated at Rs. 4,301 crore. The net dividend payment to the Finance Ministry was estimated at Rs. 5,430 crore.

The Railways' demand of deferring payment of dividend follows its poor financial performance. In this financial year, till October, the Railways had registered a huge shortfall in its total earnings by Rs 14,284 crore from its total budgeted earnings of Rs 1,03,900 crore. While its passenger earnings fell 10 per cent short of its budget projections, its freight earnings had a 13 per cent shortfall.

The operating ratio, an indicator of the Railways' finances, has touched 113.71 per cent, a far cry from its target of 92 per cent. This means, the Railways is spending around Rs 114 to earn Rs 100.

The Railway Convention Committee, which determines the rate of dividend to be paid, also recommended waiving the dividend for 2016-17 as a one-time move.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SC asks Centre to strike a balance on Rohingya issue (.hindu)

Supreme Court orally indicates that the government should not deport Rohingya “now” as the Centre prevails over it to not record any such views in its formal order, citing “international ramifications”. The Supreme Court on Friday came close to ordering the government not to deport the Rohingya. It finally settled on merely observing that a balance should be struck between humanitarian concern for the community and the country's national security and economic interests. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions, one filed by persons within the Rohingya community, against a proposed move to deport over 40,000 Rohingya refugees. A three-judge Bench, led by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra, began by orally indicating that the government should not deport Rohingya “now”, but the government prevailed on the court to not pass any formal order, citing “international ramifications”. With this, the status quo continues even though the court gave the community liberty to approach i...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

What's ailing Namami Gange programme?(DTE)

Winters are extremely hectic for Sushma Patel, a vegetable grower in Uttar Pradesh’s Chunar town. Her farm is in the fertile plains of Ganga where people grow three crops a year. But this is the only season when she can grow vegetables. And before that, she needs to manually dig out shreds of plastic and wrappers from her one-hectare (ha) farm. “This is all because of the nullah,” she says, pointing at an open drain that runs through her field, carrying sewage from the neighbourhood to the Ganga. “Every monsoon, the drain overflows and inundates the field with a thick, black sludge and plastic debris. We cannot even go near the field as the stench of sewage fills the air,” she says. But Patel has no one to complain to as this is the way of life for most people in this ancient town. About 70 per cent of the people in Chunar depend on toilets that have on-site sanitation, such as septic tanks and pits. In the absence of a proper disposal or management system, people simply dump the faec...
3 comments
Click Here To Read more »

"ISRO has capabilities to build geostationary satellites for air quality monitoring” (downtoearth)

Pawan Gupta's findings on trans-boundary movement of pollution (Punjab to Delhi) from biomass burning in 2015 spurred debates. He participated in discussions with Indian regulators early September at the Better Air Quality Conference in Busan on the advantages of using satellite data for air quality monitoring. He explains to Down to Earth how air quality monitoring is done using satellite data. How is satellite data used to measure air pollution? Satellites that provide information on atmospheric pollutants are normally (not always) in the low earth orbits (400-1000 km above the Earth’s surface). A single satellite can carry one or more remote sensing instruments onboard that look down to earth and obtain information about the object in the field of view of satellite sensor. The Earth receives electromagnetic radiation from the sun, which travels through space and reaches the earth-atmosphere system. The radiation then interacts with the Earth’s atmosphere and the surface...
1 comment
Click Here To Read more »