LAHORE, Oct 22: Pakistan Railways revenue for the first quarter of the current financial year was Rs3.069 billion and working expenses Rs2.496 billion — yielding a net income of Rs573 million.

The figures were released by the general manager (Operations), Iqbal Samad Khan, at a news conference here on Monday. He said the department had also achieved the budgetary target of Rs3.229 billion set by the Finance Division for period ending on Oct 10. In fact, he claimed, the PR revenue for the period had been Rs3.246 million, Rs17.5 million more than the target.

He said there used to be a wide gap between the expenditure and revenue of Pakistan Railways. The gap, he said, had been Rs2.63 billion in 1998-99. It was brought down to Rs819 million during the previous year. He hoped that the department would post substantial net income at the end of the current year despite the additional burden of Rs700 million resulting from an increase in wages and pensions from Dec 1, 2001.

Mr Khan denied that the Audit Department had uncovered 21,000 ghost pensioners in railways. He said the scam had been unearthed by the present railway administration after it introduced the pension card scheme. He said the exercise had resulted in an annual saving of Rs183 million.

The GM also said the PR had not laid off 41,000 employees. He said the department had a sanctioned strength of 133,000 employees. Out of this number, he said, 38,000 posts had been surrendered. He said the current sanctioned strength of the department was 95,000. It had 92,500 employees on its rolls. He said the administration planned to recruit 2,500 more employees.

Mr Khan said the Audit Department had unearthed irregularities, corruption and embezzlement long after it had taken place and most of those involved had retired. He said the audit exercise was a ‘post-mortem’ not a preventive act. With the establishment of vigilance directorate, he said, such irregularities were being detected early. The directorate, manned by 253 armed forces personnel working in the PR on secondment, he said, had so far detected 2,000 cases of fraud. As a result, he said, 61 officers and 356 officials had been removed from service.

Replying to a question, he said, the Railway Board chairman had written a letter to the PAC to protest unfair reporting.

Replying to another question, he said lack of cooperation by provincial governments was hampering the PR campaign for retrieving its land from encroachers and illegal occupants. He said out of 159,440 acres of PR land, 3,648 acres had been under encroachments in 1999. About 785 acres had been retrieved till September 2001.

Answering another question, he said, PR fares changed with POL prices. He said in fixing passenger fares, the PR had taken the road transport fares into account. He also said the administration was trying to attract more passengers on Lahore-Multan and Lahore-Rawalpindi sections.