Railway minister of Bengal

Some 13 years ago, Deve Gowda was known as the prime minister of Karnataka because of his penchant for travelling to his state every other week to inaugurate something or the other. Mamata Banerjee has gone a step further.

She took over on Tuesday as the country���s railway minister at a function held in Kolkata in the wake of Cyclone Aila hitting West Bengal. The other Union ministers took charge of their portfolios in their respective offices in New Delhi, with the TV news channels showing them being greeted with a bouquet by the top official in the ministry.

Mamata being Mamata, the Railway Board chairman S S Khurana flew down to Kolkata to hand over the file formalising the taking over of office by the new minister. A flurry of decisions was also announced by Mamata, to be effected within a month. A new Howrah-Digha Kandari Express would run to mark the birth-anniversary of the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam.

The Ludhiana-Kolkata freight corridor would be completed on a priority basis. And monthly-travel tickets, priced
at Rs 16, would be provided for those earning below Rs 500 a month.

During the British Raj, Kolkata (then Calcutta) was the capital before the shift to New Delhi. It remains to be seen whether Mamata reverses this trend by shifting the railway minister���s office to Kolkata. The next step could be to launch Rajdhani trains linking Kolkata with the rest of India! Mamata could even set a trend for other Union Cabinet ministers from regional parties.

Take Tamil Nadu CM Karunanidhi���s son Azhagiri who is slated to be the Union minister for chemicals and fertilisers. Azhagiri could shift his ministry���s office to Madurai from where he has been controlling Tamil Nadu���s southern districts for the past few years. So what if the whole idea of making Azhagiri a Union minister is to ensure that he doesn���t get in the way once his younger brother Stalin taking over as CM from Dad!