For the first time since Independence, a Gujarati will be presenting the country's Railway Budget in parliament on Wednesday.
The railway minister, Dinesh Trivedi, belongs to Trinamool Congress (TMC) and was elected to parliament from Barrackpore in West Bengal. Yet he has kept in touch with his roots in Kutch all through his life.
The railway minister was born in Delhi to a Gujarati couple and later grew up in Kolkata. However, his family hails from Bidada village in coastal Mandvi taluka of Gujarat's Kutch district.
Born in 1950, he is the youngest child of Hiralal Trivedi and Urmilaben Trivedi, a Gujarati couple who had migrated to India from Karachi (in Pakistan) during Partition.
Though he has lived out of Gujarat for a long time, Trivedi speaks Gujarati fluently. Interestingly, in 1996 he contested the Lok Sabha election from Kutch on the Congress' ticket but was defeated by the BJP candidate Pushpadan Gadhavi.
Now that he belongs to TMC and has been elected from West Bengal, industry is not expecting him to announce anything big for Gujarat in the railway budget.
The bullet train that was to run between Ahmedabad and Pune via Mumbai is yet to be announced, though a couple of feasibility studies have been conducted for the project.
However, industry in Gujarat expects him to announce a rail coach factory in the state. Gujarat industries are also hoping that the minister will announce a cut in freight on coal. Railways had increased freight on coal just before the railway budget by around 20%.
"The decision is particularly unfair to Gujarat. Hence the trading and business community has already registered its protest against the move. We expect some relief in this regard," said Mahendra Patel, president of Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Industry also expects the railway minister to fulfil the promises made in the last budget and implement changes in the new railway time table.
There are not many trains from Gujarat to the eastern and southern parts of the country. Bhagyesh Soneji, chairperson of ASSOCHAM-Gujarat, said that the railway ministry should increase the number of trains to these parts from all major railway stations in the state.
She further said that the railways should set up a monitoring cell for facilities provided to passengers such as train schedule updates through SMS.
