Dear Editor,
I refer to Navindra Singh’s letter captioned “Critics have ignored the context in which the decision to scrap the railway was made” (06.12.21) wherein the writer seeks to provide an excuse for those who closed the railway.
The excuse he gives is the following: “Decisions are made within a particular context which usually can’t take into account unpredictable variables”. It must be noted that in whatever context decisions are made, there are good decisions and bad decisions.
Bad decisions are those which have failed to take into account all available facts and trends and show negligence in so doing. The context and environment in which a decision is made is simply part of a process and no process is the arbiter of whether a decision is a good or bad one. The onus of making good or bad decisions lies with the decision makers. Decision makers who make bad decisions cannot excuse themselves by hiding behind the “process”.
A reiteration of the reasons given for the scrapping of the railway is no justification for the scrapping. For example, those who give as a “reason” that the railway was making a loss and therefore should be replaced by road transport never quantified the costs of road transport and the possible profit or loss it could make.
Actually, road transport was much more expensive in the cost of vehicles and the cost of maintenance of both vehicles and road. This was quickly seen when the road began to break up and waves of buses – Leyland, Yugoslav and Tata – costing hundred of millions of US dollars were rapidly consigned to the scrap heap.
The Decision to scrap the railway was a bad one and Dr. Ptolemy Reid, the Prime Minister and one who had to make the policy to close the railway, admitted that it was a mistake and a bad decision.
Those who are going against Dr. Reid’s analysis and view are doing so either because they were involved in the closure or they are seeking to defend the action of a political party to which they are sympathetic.
Yours faithfully,
B. Walker
