Former Bihar Chief Minister Rabri Devi was on Saturday grilled for six hours in Patna by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a railway hotels allotment corruption case, official sources said.

Rabri Devi, wife of RJD chief Lalu Prasad, reached the ED zonal office in the state capital by noon. “A special team of the agency from Delhi recorded her statement under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). She was questioned for six hours,” a senior official said.

The ED has earlier questioned Rabri Devi’s son Tejashwi Yadav, former deputy chief minister of Bihar, twice in this case.

In July, the agency had registered a case against Lalu Prasad, his family members and others under various provisions of the PMLA.

Before that, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had registered a first information report and conducted multiple searches on the properties of Lalu Prasad and others.

The CBI FIR alleged that Lalu Prasad, during his tenure as the railway minister in the UPA-I government, handed over the maintenance of two Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) hotels to a company in 2004 after receiving bribe in the form of a prime land in Patna through a ‘benami’ company owned by Sarla Gupta, wife of Prem Chand Gupta, a former Union minister.

The ED registered the criminal case against his family members and others under the PMLA, based on the CBI FIR.

The CBI has already recorded the statements of Tejashwi and Lalu Prasad in this case. The ED is investigating the alleged “proceeds of crime” generated by the accused, purportedly through shell companies, according to the officials.

Others named in the CBI FIR include Vijay Kochhar, Vinay Kochhar (both directors of Sujata Hotels), Delight Marketing company, now known as Lara Projects, and then IRCTC managing director P K Goel.

The CBI FIR was registered on July 5 in connection with favours allegedly extended to Sujata Hotels in awarding a contract for the upkeep of the hotels in Ranchi and Puri and receiving premium land as “quid pro quo”.

Over 9 lakh senior citizens have voluntarily given up their ticket subsidies under the ‘give up’ scheme of the Railways, thereby helping the government to save around Rs. 40 crore.

Under the scheme launched last year, senior citizens had the option to either avail the full concession provided to them on rail tickets or forgo the entire amount. This year, a new option was added in which a senior citizen can give up 50 per cent of the subsidy.

The scheme was launched to reduce the nearly Rs. 1,300 crore subsidy burden of the Railways in the senior citizen category.

From July 22 to October 22, 2.16 lakh men and 2.67 lakh women gave up their full subsidy, while 2.51 lakh men and 2.05 lakh women decided not to avail 50 per cent of their subsidy – making the total number of passengers over 60 years to give up their subsidy at 9.39 lakh in three months.

During the same period last year, only about 4.68 lakh senior citizens gave up their subsidies – 2.35 lakh men and 2.33 lakh women.

“The figures show that the number of people letting forgoing the subsidy has doubled in one year. It is great news for Railways as we are looking to reduce our losses incurred through subsidies,” said a senior official of the ministry.

As of now, Railways bears 43 per cent of the cost of train fare and incurs a loss of about Rs. 30,000 crore a year in subsidising passenger fares out of which Rs. 1,600 crore is for concessional fares.

Railways recovers only 57 per cent of the expenses incurred for passenger transportation through sale of tickets of all classes.

It’s approaching fog time again, threatening severe disruption of train services as is usual every winter, causing much inconvenience to passengers.However, the railways’ fog-preparedness still seems to inadequate as the much talked-about LED fog lights and other technology in locomotives of north-bound trains — aimed at increasing visibility for train drivers in adverse weather conditions — is still in the trial stage.

All north-bound trains get delayed for hours due to poor visibility during foggy weather, causing a ripple effect on the congested network. The dense fog forces drivers to slow down train speeds up to 15 kmph as a safety requirement — resulting in delays ranging between four and 22 hours.

Rattled by the massive disruption in services year after year in winter, the railways has initiated several steps to use technology to fight fog.

Since drivers cannot see the signals due to the fog, crackers are put on the track ahead of the station. When the train passes over the crackers they burst and alert the drivers that a station is approaching.

“For us, the safety of passengers is of paramount importance. Even if a train is delayed, the passengers should travel safe. Since visibility drops, drivers cannot see the signals and take the risk of maintaining the normal speed. There are always chances of accidents during the fog because drivers fail to see signals,” said a senior Railway Ministry official involved in safety who was not authorised to speak to the press.

The TPWS, based on the European system, and the indigenously-developed TCAS enable the driver to see the signal in his cabin through a cab signalling system. Even in dense fog or heavy rain, the driver easily sees the signals in his cabin and accordingly maintains speed. The system incorporates an automatic braking system in case the driver fails to do so manually in the event of an emergency.

However, only 35 locomotives are equipped with the TPWS system for trials. Besides, some EMUs on the Chennai suburban network and the Kolkata Metro are TPWS compliant.

With TCAS, drivers get a real-time display of signals inside the cabin, This traces the location of the train through the distance traversed through RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags installed on the tracks and transmits the signal to all other trains in the vicinity.

The Tri-NETRA system enables the driver to view the terrain on a computer installed in the cabin.

However, all these systems are in the pilot stage.

As for the LED fog lights, the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO) of the railways is currently finalising their specifications on these.

The railways expects that once these systems are installed, it will help in enhancing the vision of locomotive drivers in difficult weather conditions, such as fog, heavy rains and during the night time so that they have enough time to react to an emergency.

Nearly a month after dairy giant Amul approached the Indian Railways on its official Twitter handle with a business proposition to use refrigerated parcel vans to transport butter across India, the first shipment is on its way.

“First refrigerator van with 17 MT #Amul butter being flagged off from Palanpur to Delhi with our milk train. Thanks @RailMinIndia for the prompt action,” Amul tweeted on Saturday.

On September 23, Amul had reached out to the railway ministry on its Twitter handle for advice on the proposition, saying the dairy major was “interested in using refrigerated parcel vans to transport Amul butter across India.”

The Railways promptly responded on the micro-blogging site, using a popular tag line of the company. “IR will be utterly butterly delighted to get the taste of India to every Indian,” the ministry’s handle @RailMinIndia tweeted.

The national transporter uses Twitter extensively to address passenger woes. But that was perhaps the first time it received a business proposition on the popular social site.

The Indian Railways had introduced the refrigerated van service a few years ago with an aim to facilitate the transportation of perishable commodities such as fruits, vegetables, frozen meats/poultry and chocolates.

However, these services existed only on specific routes.

Coal and Railway Minister Piyush Goyal on Tuesday said the Indian Railways will completely phase out diesel locomotives in the next five years and will switch to electric locomotives with the focus on increasing speed.

“We have planned to switch all trains to be electric-driven in the next five years,” Mr Goyal said, addressing the National Executive Council members of FICCI.

By phasing out diesel locomotives, the Railways will save about Rs. 11,500 crore annually, he said. “The diesel locomotives will be used for back up purposes in the yards.”

Stressing on the safety of passengers, the railway minister also said that he has directed the railway officials to speed up the production of the Linke-Hofmann-Busch (LHB) coaches instead of relying on the Integrated Coach Factory (ICF) coaches.

“We are promoting LHB type coaches as they are more safer as compared to the ICF coaches,” he said, adding that June 2018 will be the last month for the ICF coaches to be manufactured.

“I have also asked the rail coach factories to develop the LHB coaches and also asked the Rae Bareli coach factory to double up its production, as it currently has the capacity to build 1,000 coaches annually.”

Mr Goyal said that he had also spoken to Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath to allot 200 acres more land for the expansion of the Rae Bareli coach factory.

He also defined his tenure in the last 77 days as the Railways Minister as a “good learning experience”. “I got a chance to take a number of policy decisions here.”

He said he has taken upward 600 policy decisions on policy matters of the Railways.

For safety of passengers also we have approved 372 escalators in Mumbai suburban alone and we will have close to 3,000 escalators being set up in the Railways across the country,” Mr Goyal said.

He assured the industry that there is no fund shortage for safety-related items in the Railways.

Around 1,500 farmers, who were headed for Kota, are now stuck at an unfamiliar Madhya Pradesh railway station after their train travelled 160 kilometres in the wrong direction. Now, the railway authorities don’t know what to do with them.

The farmers were returning to Rajasthan and Maharashtra after attending the Kisan Yatra protest rally in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on Monday. The special train that was arranged from Maharashtra for the thousands of protesting farmers took a wrong route and left these 1494 farmers stranded in Madhya Pradesh’s Banmore station near Gwalior.

According to sources, the railway authorities gave a wrong signal to the train at the Mathura station, which led to the train landing up in Madhya Pradesh instead of Maharashtra.

“We left Delhi at 10pm on Tuesday and woke up at 6am to find ourselves at Banmore railway station in Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. After Agra, we had to move towards Kota in Rajasthan, however, due to serious negligence by the Railways, we are now in in MP,” passenger Mahavir Patil told News18.

When News18 spoke to one of the stranded passengers who was headed for Kohlapur, he said they have been delayed by 5-6 hours.

As the passengers approached the station master for information, he pleaded ignorance about the route plan and declined to give them a green signal. After a delay of over one and half hour, the passengers then ran out of patience and created a ruckus by stopping a goods train.

Passenger S Madanaike said, “When we spoke to the driver, he said there was a wrong signal at the Mathura railway station which caused this goof up. It looks like we will only reach by Thursday morning.”

After skipping summonses six times, former Bihar Chief Minister Rabri Devi is expected to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in Patna tomorrow in connection with a railway hotels allotment corruption case, official sources said today.

Rabri Devi, the wife of RJD chief Lalu Prasad, is expected to meet the investigating officer (IO) of the money laundering case at the ED zonal office in Bihar’s capital and record her statement.

Lalu Prasad was the railway minister in the UPA-I government.

She has skipped appearing before the agency at least six times in the past and it is understood that the central probe agency allowed her request to be questioned in Patna and not in Delhi, where the criminal case has been registered.

The ED has earlier questioned Rabri Devi’s son Tejashwi Yadav, the former deputy chief minister of Bihar, twice in this case.

In July, the agency registered a case against Lalu Prasad, his family members and others under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Just before this, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a criminal first information report and conducted multiple searches on the properties of Lalu Prasad and others.

The CBI FIR alleged that Lalu Prasad, during his tenure as the railway minister in the UPA-I, handed over the maintenance of two Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation hotels to a company in 2004 after receiving a bribe in the form of a prime land in Patna through a ‘benami’ company owned by Sarla Gupta, wife of Prem Chand Gupta, a former Union minister.

The ED registered the criminal case against his family members and others under the PMLA, based on this CBI FIR.

The CBI has already recorded the statements of Tejashwi and Lalu Prasad in this case.

The ED is investigating the alleged “proceeds of crime” generated by the accused, purportedly through shell companies, according to the officials.

Others named in the CBI FIR include Vijay Kochhar, Vinay Kochhar (both directors of Sujata Hotels), Delight Marketing company, now known as Lara Projects, and the then IRCTC managing director P K Goel.

The CBI FIR was registered on July 5 in connection with favours allegedly extended to Sujata Hotels in awarding a contract for the upkeep of the hotels in Ranchi and Puri and receiving premium land as “quid pro quo”.

A clause in India’s global tender for steel rails, part of a $130 billion overhaul of its railways, could help Jindal Steel and Power Ltd win up to 20 percent of the work, sources said.

The world’s fourth-largest rail system is undergoing a five-year overhaul to replace ageing tracks, improve efficiency and end a spate of deadly train accidents.

State-run Steel Authority of India Ltd (SAIL) has struggled to supply the steel, however, and is expected to deliver 920,000 tonnes of it this financial year, just 65 percent of its target.

Global steelmakers such as ArcelorMittal and Thyssenkrupp could bid, as could Jindal Steel and Power, India’s only private producer of the steel.

India’s steel ministry has objected to the tender, pointing out that preference should be given to local suppliers in support of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s drive to boost manufacturing.

Indian Railways officials have also expressed concern that JSPL lacks experience building rails, three people with knowledge of the conversations told Reuters this month.

A senior Railways official said any decision for the tender would depend on competitive bidding, which opens next month.

‘DEVELOPMENTAL’ CLAUSE

However, Indian Railways is considering using a clause in the Oct. 18 tender that allows for a “developmental” or a trial order of up to 20 percent of the steel to be awarded to a domestic manufacturer, four officials with direct knowledge of the proposal said.

It can award that work even if the bidder “does not have proven performance of supply of rails”, according to the tender.

JSPL, which says it has supplied 150,000 tonnes of rail to Iran since 2016, did not respond to a request for immediate comment.

The railways ministry is likely to make a decision within two weeks and is keen to award work to JSPL in light of the government’s policy on local producers, two officials with knowledge of the discussions told Reuters.

The ministry did not respond to a request for immediate comment.