Debates about the Railways performance have largely focused on the trends in revenue earnings and expenditures and the growth of freight and passenger traffic, the rail network and the rolling stock. The operational ratios, as worked out in the annual railway budgets, have been the most popular indicator, which shows the variations in the Railways? performance. Trends in recent years show that the gains made my the Railways when the operating ratio was lowered to 75.9% in 2007-08 has been dissipated, with the ratio rising up once again to 95.3% in 2009-10, after pay revisions. The most recent numbers in the railway budget, presented last February, show that the operating ratio will come down to 91.1% in 2011-12.
However, the operational ratio says more about the balance sheet and hardly measures the trends in the physical performance or improvements in efficiencies of the Railways. Two indicators to the overall physical performance are the indices of freight traffic and passenger traffic. Similarly, the Railways also works out the investment input indices of wagon capacity, passenger coaches, route kms, running track kms and the tractive efforts of the locos which indicate the trends in the utilisation of assets. However, most data on improvement in the physical performance or the utilisation of assets are for the freight traffic and for the overall network as in the case of energy efficiency.
But some indicators of the physical performance of the Railways are shocking. Numbers in the most recent Railway Year Book for 2009-10 show that the total number of wagons has steadily declined from 387,000 in 1980-81 to 335,000 in 1990-91, 214,000 in 2000-01 and has touched 209,000 in 2009-10, a number less than that of 1960-61. Most probably this sharp reduction in the numbers may indicate the replacement of existing stock with higher capacity wagons. The numbers on total freight carrying capacity do support this argument to some extent. But it should still be noted that the total freight carrying capacity of wagons per day has gone up only marginally from 11.14 million tonnes in 1980-81 to 12.39 million tonnes in 2009-10.
Trends for the last two decades indicate substantial improvements in operating efficiencies, especially in average train loads and net tonne kms carried per wagon per day. In both these cases, the improvements has not only been substantial but the rate of improvement seem to have even accelerated in the most recent period. However, the gains in terms of the turnaround time of wagons and the average speed of freight trains have been a little less significant.
Trends in average train loads indicate that the average train load of freight trains has gone up by 154 tonnes in the first decade between 1990-91 and 2000-01 when the numbers went up from 1,079 tonnes in 1990-91 to 1,233 tonnes in 2000-01. However, the gains made between 2000-01 and 2009-10 were more impressive as the average train load increased by 458 tonnes to 1,691 during the period.
Even better was the performance in terms of the net tonne kilometres carried per wagon. Numbers here show that while the net tonne kms of freight carried per wagon went up by 635 tonnes in the first decade between 1990-91 and 2000-01 the quantity of freight carried per wagon went up more than four-fold to 9,270 tonnes by 2009-10. The gains made in the second decade were more than ten-fold over the previous decade.
However, in the case of the turnaround time of wagons, the gains are less impressive, probably on account of the long freight routes which makes it difficult to cut turnaround times below a certain level. While the Railways was able to push down turn around time of the wagons from 11.5 days in 1990-91 to 7.5 days in 2000-01, a gain of four days, the efficiencies decelerated in the later period. Between 2000-01 and 2009-10, the turnaround time of wagons could be lowered by only 2.52 days to 4.98 days.
Less impressive have been the gains made in the speed of the freight trains and its speed went up from 22.7 km per hour in 1990-91 to 24.1 km an hour in the first decade between 1990-91 and 2000-01. And the progress in the next decade was not much better with the speed increasing to just 25.8 km/hour by ?09-10. The congestion of rail tracks and the low power of the locos would be the main stumbling blocks to any substantial improvements on this front.
But more worrisome is the Railways? record on the energy consumption. The numbers here show that the energy consumed on goods services has gone up by around a third in the five years between 2005-06 to 2009-10 with the coal equivalent of the energy consumed going up from 50.23 kgs per 1,000 gross tonne kms to 68.02 kg per 1,000 gross tonne km during the period. Such a sharp increase in energy consumption is unsustainable and points to the need for urgent measures to improve energy efficiencies. The substantial disparities in the fuel energy point to the potential gains that could be made on this front.