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C.O.882/12

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no provision is made now, and none is secured (except by borrow- ing) under the General Manager's scheme. The very great reduc- tion in train running, and the large surplus of material which will be available, must have the effect of reducing the needs of the railways for several years.

18. In this scheme we are neither vague as regards expenditure nor over-optimistic as regards revenue. We allow nothing for increased revenue owing to the prohibition of the transport of heavy goods on certain roads or the restrictions on competing lorry traffic. We accept the department's very low estimate of the receipts from the business trains, including a parcels traffic which is reduced to almost negligible dimensions, but need not be so. We reduce the miscellaneous income Rs.14,000 below the present estimate. We take a figure for sugar and canes which is Rs.7,000 below last year's actuals and Rs.73,000 below the actuals of the preceding year.

On the expenditure side we base the scheme on the detailed figures supplied by the department, and although we believe then to be inflated, we have proposed no reduction on those figures except for definite reasons. The additional cuts which we have proposed amount to Rs.104,840 apart from the cuts resulting from our general scheme of retrenchment for all departments; but the reductions recommended by the Railway Department itself total Rs. 987,690. It must certainly take some time before the fullest advantage is taken of the reduction in train services: further economies are not impossible.

By this scheme we do not claim that we remove all deficit on the working of the railways, but we make that deficit of minor importance the railways will no longer be an increasing burden on the finances of the Colony.

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Yet our proposals are no hardship to the community: instead of compelling the public to take what it does not want, and to pay a higher price for it, as in the alternative scheme, we deprive the public of facilities of which it has ceased to avail itself, but we preserve the essential services, the cheapest form of transport for the sugar trade, and suburban trains for the business men.

We should add that we cannot expect that this drastic reduction of services should be carried out in a single and abrupt measure: there must be a certain gradation, both in order to avoid too violent a displacement of labour, and also in order to give the road services time in which to accommodate extra passengers. A number of passenger trains, those which carry very few passengers, can imme- diately be discontinued, and the process of reduction, though gradually accomplished, should be completed in a year.

We do not believe that any measure short of this complete scheme will free the Colonial budget from the burden of the railway losses.

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19. We discussed the transport problem with the newly-appointed General Manager of Railways before we left England and were therefore acquainted with the views expressed by him in his memorandum of 12th August, 1931 (enclosed with the Secretary of State's despatch 175 of 18th August*), which we have examined in paragraph 14. The General Manager returned to Mauritius shortly before we left and we were able to discuss our proposals with him. Two days before we sailed from Mauritius he submitted other proposals which we must briefly examine.

must now be can- We are informed that his original scheme celled owing to the financial position in England-and to the critical position of the Colony's cash resources". The detailed proposals for buying experimental plant, the quite undetailed estimates of the savings which this new plant would provide, are lightly abandoned on the pretext of factors which were quite obvious when those proposals and estimates were first put forward. His report of the 23rd October proceeds—“ immediate steps must be taken to reduce working expenditure' but makes no proposals of any kind for this reduction. On the other hand we read—" what- ever cuts are applied to the railway, and, I repeat, that up to a point they must obviously be applied immediately and ruthlessly in all branches, the practicability and moral effect of dismissing personnel will have repercussions which may seriously embarrass the Colonial Government, so that I feel bound to put up alternative proposals to those which the Commissioners have been good enough to discuss with me".

special The alternative proposals are simply that a maintenance toll " should be imposed on the bus service in the suburban area; the toll would yield Rs.200,000 and this would both relieve the burden of the railway deficit and drive passengers back to the railway. It is called a maintenance toll on the pretext that the money is needed for the upkeep of the roads, the cost of which is in fact fully covered by existing taxation on road vehicles. We have already dealt with this issue of the taxation of road traffic which remains the only solution which the Railway Depart- ment can put forward, and need not give further space to the examination of proposals which are lightly put forward and as lightly dropped. Even on this issue the General Manager is unable to make up his mind whether the bus traffic is or is not economically unsound, though he is disposed to supplement his taxation proposals with the suggestion that the bus traffic cannot long continue even if it is not taxed. We attach little importance from various to the figures of bus costs which have been gathered independent and reliable sources," especially as the conclusion to be derived from them is never the same; we have based our own proposals on the railway's own costing statistics, which appear to us to rest on a firmer foundation of authority.

* C. 84613/31 [No. 2]; not printed,

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