Patna, Aug. 13: Former railway minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad today opposed the idea of merging the railway budget with the general budget from 2017-18. 

Lalu strongly condemned the Narendra Modi government’s reported move to do away with presenting the separate railway budget. Expressing displeasure, he said: “Railway budget cannot be merged with the general budget. The railways can develop when the separate budget is presented. I must say that once the railway budget is merged with the general budget, the railways will never develop.” 

Lalu was the Union railway minister in the 2004 UPA government and he used to take pride in claiming that the railways had earned a profit of Rs 1,000 crore in his tenure. 

Recently, Lalu had written an open letter to the Prime Minister, accusing the Centre of hiding the loss of revenue in the railways by setting up different committees with focus on cost-cutting and unbundling. 

He had also alleged that the Centre was taking steps to hand over the railways to corporate houses, which triggered the fear of job loss among railway employees. 

Lalu had said that the railways had been borrowing huge money for projects, which ultimately became cash guzzling projects. 

The leader had termed the Bullet train project a suicidal step and had asked the Prime Minister to intervene in reforming the railways. He had also attacked Modi over the Pakistan issue and termed him a “weak Prime Minister”. 

“Just big talk will not help, why doesn’t the Prime Minister act against Pakistan? He is a weak PM,” Lalu asserted after paying floral tributes to the body of former RJD MP Mohammad Anwarul Haque at the party office this afternoon. 
The RJD chief was reacting to Modi’s remark during an all-party meeting on the unrest in Kashmir in which he said atrocities in Pakistan and Baluchistan must be exposed. 

Even chief minister Nitish Kumar, who was also the railway minister at the time of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s tenure as Prime Minister, had made sarcastic remarks on the Centre’s decision of ending the tradition of presenting a separate budget for the railways. 

“What more can you expect from the Centre when they are ending their own government schemes?” Nitish said. He was attacking the Centre over cutting and allocation of funds in central schemes.