Pawan Kumar Bansal has served as the Minister of Railways since October 28, 2012. Bansal has been a high-level leader in the Indian National Congress since the mid-1970s, working in and, as an elected official, representing Chandigarh.
Bansal was born in 1948 in the south Punjab district of Sangrur, a formerly agrarian crossroads turned boomtown. Bansal studied law at Punjab University, but quickly pivoted to start his political career with the Congress party, becoming general secretary and then president of the Chandigarh- and Punjab-level youth congresses between 1976 and 1984. Thereafter, he became a member of the Rajya Sabha through the decade, rising to Congress party whip by 1989. Bansal was first elected to the Lok Sabha in 1991. The following year, he garnered the highest number of votes is his election to the party's executive parliamentary committee. Following his re-election to the Lok Sabha in 1999 he became secretary of the All India Congress Committee, and after his third election, in 2004, he became one of the party’s top officials. Since 2006, he has always held a minister of state or union minister position, cycling between the ministerships noted earlier.
In late October 2012, in a major reshuffle of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, Bansal took over as head of the highly lucrative Railways Ministry, one of the most prominent berths in the central government and long a key concession to the Trinamool Congress, a splittist party that nonetheless has been a key though problematic Congress party ally. When that political relationship ended in September 2012, along with the resignation of five Trinamool ministers from the coalition government, the Congress leadership took back the Railways Ministry, giving it briefly to CP Joshi and then to Bansal, a situation many observers believe will remain unchanged through the 2014 national elections. Previously, Bansal had held multiple cabinet ministerships, including Parliamentary Affairs, Water, and Science and Technology.
Although not seen necessarily as a reformer, Bansal’s long experience at the center of national government, coupled with a fairly clean reputation, has led the top party leadership to see him as a competent, if not technocratic, hand that can get things done. The Congress move to take back the Railways Ministry was a significant one, with Congress leaders using the opportunity to suggest that long periods under other parties had left the sprawling ministry weakened.
Since taking office, Bansal has discussed a potential hike in fares – a politically explosive issue that hasn’t been seriously broached in more than a decade.
