Railway or Railways Minister?

A huge network which carries people and freight across India is the Indian Railways, that is Railway with an 's' attached. Like the plural of the word.

The minister in charge of that department is almost always referred to as the Railway minister. The 's' is missing.

Shouldn't it be the Railways Minister?

The annual budget he or she presents to the Parliament is, again, most often, the Railway Budget, not the Railways Budget. 

Even the Indian Railways uses it as a singular on its portal where the budget is uploaded, and headlined the 2013 budget as the 'Railway Budget' - the 's' missing. Some newspapers trim it to Rail Budget.

However, some newspapers, do use it in the correct form but only occasionally.

Makes one wonder, which is right - the one in popular usage or the way the Indian railways calls itself?

This confusion is confounded when the entity calls itself 'Bharatiya Rail' as its Hindi version.

There is much confusion at the official level itself. The body, which was later registered under the Indian Companies Act, came to be under the Indian Railways (yes, with that 's'). However, in an amendment to that Act in 1989, the law-makers used both railways and Railway.

The head of the unit that provides the oversight on safety is the Commissioner, Railway Safety, and each of its several zones are only a railway. There is the Central Railway, the Western Railway etc.

Interestingly, the top group that administers the entire network is not the Railways Board but Railway Board.

Civic body, no civic sense, but Sackrifice?

Headlines have to say a lot in few words, space being a constraint. The idea is to attract attention to a news item and them draw the reader into the text underneath it.

The Times of India has in the past used puns in some headlines, as if they were all written by Bachi Karkaria. She is a punster and read this to estimate her incorrigible capacity for playing with words. She writes a regular column, Erratica.

Yesterday's (May 10, 2013) one headline in that newspaper deserves an applause. Mumbai's city government was told by a judge of the Bombay High Court that the civic body that "you are not behaving as the municipal corporation for the maintenance of Mumbai, but as the municipal corporation for the destruction of Mumbai".

Of course, what Justice Dhananjay Chandrachud said was not part of an order or a judgement but a part of the proceedings on a public interest litigation (PIL).

Instead of the trite stuff like 'Judge raps' the civic body etc., the headline said this: High court slams BMC for lacking civic sense. A civic body without civic sense.

Compare it with this headline, Sackrifice for survival, in DNA, of May 11, 2013, for a story on how Railways Minister, Pawan Bansal had 'sacrificed' a goat to remain in office but had to finally quit when asked to by the Prime Minister following a bribery scam involving Bansal's nephew. It was a combination of 'sack' and sacrifice'.

It has to be noted that we don't know if the goat was sacrificed or fed since the media - newspapers, television and social media - speak of both.

It rings false, but such headlines, such coined words always do.