Alleging that Lalu Prasad Yadav had juggled Railways accounts for the past five years and that Mamata Banerjee was feeling the squeeze now, BJP leader Arun Jaitley said on Tuesday that Mamata could now well author “what they don’t teach you at the Harvard management school”.

Initiating the debate on the Railway Budget in the Rajya Sabha, the BJP’s Leader of Opposition in the House said the government had been “misleading” the people the past five years on the issue of passenger fares. Mamata, he advised, should focus on the core areas of Railways, which is “to ensure safe and comfortable travel for people”.

“For five years, we had been told that the Railways was a jersey cow which had not been milked... Now, the vision of the UPA seems to have changed,” he said.

Urging the Railways to focus on safety and comfortable travel, Jaitley criticised its ventures into “non-core areas”.

He sought to know whether running malls, hotels, medical colleges, nursing colleges, optical fibre units and printing pre1ss was in its jurisdiction. “The Railways cannot become a parallel government. The Prime Minister must examine it,” he said.

Responding to Jaitley’s charge that Railways was building medical colleges, Mamata said that these were meant for sons and daughters of its 14 lakh employees.

Though his party may be a new friend of the RJD, the SP’s Ram Gopal Yadav also questioned some recent statistics given by the Railways.