March 10: China is firing the boss of all babudoms, burying a tradition that was replicated with messianic zeal in Bengal and some other parts of India.

China announced today that it would dismantle its railway ministry, known as “Boss Railway” because of the sweeping powers the bureaucratic behemoth wielded, as part of its biggest streamlining exercise since 1998.

The restructuring marks the country’s latest attempt to reduce government meddling in the economy and society — something many in India are familiar with.

Similarities between the Indian Railways — which presents its annual budget in Parliament while other carriers take care of their accounting in less hallowed real estate — and the Chinese giant are striking.

The Chinese railway had its own police force till recently. The Chinese utility still has something that should warm Mamata Banerjee’s heart and make her overlook the neighbour’s tenuous connection with the CPM: the Railway Art Troupe that sings, dances and puts on acrobatic shows and operas. Not to mention the China Locomotive Sports Team, which trains athletes in soccer, boxing, weightlifting, swimming and track and field.

The Chinese railway handles 1.8 billion passengers a year and employs 2.1 million people.

But under a new plan introduced in the rubber-stamp national legislature of China, the railway ministry will be split. Its regulatory responsibilities will go to the transport ministry and its operations to a commercial entity.

The other key proposed changes are:

Another influential bureaucracy, the family planning commission, which enforces the much-disliked rules that limit many families to one child, will be merged with the health ministry.

Two agencies that censor broadcasters and the print media will be combined into a super media regulator.

Five agencies that police fisheries and other maritime resources are being united into one to better assert China’s control over disputed waters, potentially sharpening conflicts with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

The National Energy Administration, created five years ago to help oversee a pressing need for the fast-growing but resource-strapped economy, would be expanded to absorb a regulatory body that sets electric rates.

Overall, the realignment would do away with four agencies and reduce the number of ministry-level bodies by two to 25.

“Departments of the State Council (cabinet) are now focusing too much on micro issues. We should attend to our duties and must not meddle in what is not in our business,” Ma Kai, secretary-general of the council, told legislators.

Ma’s words will touch a raw nerve in Bengal, where the Left Front government had patented the science of inventing ministries to accommodate sympathisers and partners.

The ministries of fire, library and school education (in addition to a higher education cousin) are trophies Bengal has donated to the museum of redundancies whose principal objective is to find chairs for ministers who usually kill time twiddling their thumbs.

The Mamata government has merged some departments such as the education cousins (technical education is still a separate berth). But fire and library are still burning bright, although the number of ministries is within the prescribed limit.

CPM central committee member Mohammad Salim said in response to a question: “Bengal’s and China’s political scenes are vastly different. In Bengal, we ran a coalition government which entailed allocation of different departments to different Left Front constituents. That was required to maintain the coalition. However, if a CPM-led Left Front returns to power, objective conditions will have to be examined before taking decisions like downsizing departments.”

A central minister more or less echoed Salim. UPA government spokesperson and I&B minister Manish Tewari said: “It is difficult to extrapolate from one country to another; every country takes decisions based on local imperatives. And in a developing economy, the ministry of railways plays a unique and very important role.”

The same compulsion was cited by China, too, once. Some features that should ring a bell in India: the railway is the most popular form of long-distance transport, especially for Chinese who cannot afford to fly.

But buying tickets is difficult, and food, drink and other services on trains are poor — problems often attributed to corruption.

Even some forms of corruption share a good neighbourly relationship: in one case, almost all of a $260-million railway line in China had to be redone because unqualified sub-contractors had filled bridge foundations with rocks and sand instead of concrete.

Despite occasional efforts to arrest the trend, the Chinese government’s role in the economy and the power of state companies have grown over the past decade, often to the detriment of private and foreign companies, which face a welter of industrial and other policies that have raised barriers to success.

This time, the streamlining plan includes guidelines to restrict and better define the central government’s responsibilities, limiting its issuance of permits for projects, setting of standards and other policies that have slowed decision-making.

The scope and power of the Chinese railway ministry made it a natural place for the leadership to stamp its determination. As it expanded the railway system and built the world’s largest high-speed rail network, the ministry ran up hundreds of billions of dollars in debt and sank into corruption, giving critics an opportunity to pounce.

The ministry was so pervasive and powerful that it resisted government reform efforts for 15 years.

At each turn, the ministry’s long-standing ties to the military and a record for performance stood it in good stead. Over the past decade, it created the showcase high-speed rail system touted by the leadership as a symbol of Chinese technological power on a par with the manned space programme.

The ministry’s ability to throw money around to get things done and preserve its power in the end helped bring it down. Liu Zhijun, the bullet train network’s top booster, was ousted as minister two years ago amid accusations that he took massive bribes and steered contracts, some of them associated with the high-speed rail network. Among his rumoured misdeeds: having 18 mistresses.

Although Liu awaits trial, his fate — and perhaps the ministry’s — seemed sealed when bullet trains collided near the eastern city of Wenzhou in July 2011, killing 40 people and injuring 177. The accident outraged the country’s growing middle class — the prime users of the high-speed rail.

In the aftermath, the government began taking a harder look at corruption throughout the railways and the ministry.

“In recent years, the railways have developed in leaps and bounds and safeguarded the smooth running of the economy and people’s lives and production. But its government and enterprises are not separated. It doesn’t link smoothly with other modes of transport, and there are other problems,” Ma said.

Reformers crowed at the ministry’s abolition. “It means the country has removed the last ‘stronghold’ in the way of reforming the industry from a planned economy to a market economy,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted Wang Yiming, a government macro-economic researcher, as saying.