ISLAMABAD, March 15: At a ceremony for the rollout of 10 new coaches from the Islamabad Carriage Factory on Friday, railway minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour criticised the government for failing to commit to ‘the rehabilitation of Pakistan Railways’.

An ANP MNA from Peshawar, for the past five years Bilour has served the PPP-led coalition government in Islamabad as Minister for Railways, a position that puts him in a powerful position in the government.

Asked about the Railways' deteriorating circumstances, however, he says he is not to blame for ‘the current railway crisis. The government should be held responsible.’

Friday's ceremony, also attended by Pakistan Railways Chairman Arif Azeem, Islamabad Carriage Factory MD Habibur Rehman Khattak, and others, was for the unveiling of the first 10 coaches assembled at the ICF under a Rs15.8 billion project for the procurement of 202 coaches from China. China provided 57 coaches last year, as Completely Built Units, and sent parts to the ICF to assemble the rest.

After these ten, the remainder will be added to the fleet at the rate of 10 each month.

Bilour noted that in five years of his tenure, Pakistan Railways hadn’t managed to obtain a single new locomotive. “You can’t get better results without better equipment,” he said, insetting that the government “should have approved these projects in 2009, not 2012.

If they had been approved earlier, the railways would be on track”.

The minister named several government agencies as responsible for the deterioration in the railways.

“The Finance Ministry failed to provide funds,” he said, and also refused to relax regulations of the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority, or Pepra, “for the cause of rehabilitating the railways”.

Government priorities in general, he suggested, were misplaced. Comparing the Indian and Pakistani railways, Bilour said that Indias was better, “because India has no Motorway, no National Logistic Cell”. The emphasis on road transportation, beginning in the early 1980s, “took a major chunk of the Pakistan Railways' earnings”.