While an apple a day may keep you healthy, wealthy and wise, a new train a week most certainly keeps Railways weak, poor and certainly not wise. Unfortunately, this has been the mantra of the railway ministers over the last two decades, and the trend does not seem close to abating any time in the near future!
In the process, over 2,500 new passenger trains, with extensions and increase in frequency etc?an average of 125 a year?have been introduced, eating into valuable section capacity, leading to considerable slowdown in the through put of freight trains.
No politician worth his salt would ever miss an opportunity to gain valuable ?brownie points? by demanding and getting a new train introduced, serving his/her constituency or his/her home town, when there was an ever-obliging railway minister at hand. Visuals on any TV channel, of a politician or any other dignitary waving a green flag, setting a brand new train in motion, always makes for excellent publicity!
Arguably one of the most convenient and popular gimmicks available to the political masters of this 1.4 million strong behemoth, the captive production units?viz ICF (Integral Coach Factory) at Permabur near Chennai and RCF (Rail Coach Factory), between them churning out over 3,000 brand new coaches?enable formation of rakes for the new trains at the drop of a hat. (Although all of them don?t end up as new rakes, and some of these go towards replacement of over-aged and accidental ones.)
Added to this, DLW (Diesel Loco Works) at Varanasi, and CLW (Chittaranjan Loco Works) in West Bengal between them produce nearly 500 diesel and electric locomotives a year, providing the much-needed muscle power to haul these new trains at high speeds.
While the credit goes to late Madhavrao Scindia for conceiving and successfully introducing the concept of fast inter-city Shatabdi trains in the late 1980s, soon other railway ministers found the need to introduce their own brand of fast inter-city trains, starting with Nitish Kumar, who called them Sampark Kranti express trains, to highlight his brand of politics.
Not to be left behind, Lalu had his own version in Garib Rath and now Mamata has introduced Duronto, the point-to-point version of Rajdhani, all trying to leave a permanent mark of their concern for the millions of passengers. In her last budget speech, Mamata went a step further by announcing special services called Matribhoomi, Karmabhoomi, Janmabhoomi, and Bharat Tirth trains!
Unfortunately, in the process, the Railways ends up being a loser as with the dismally low fares, which have not seen a meaningful hike for last two decades, the passenger business is a major drain on its finances and continues to be cross-subsidised by freight earnings!
In order to make both ends meet, Railways has been forced to periodically tweak freight tariff upwards, much to the chagrin of the business community, which finds its long-term forecasts going awry.
Railways has already lost considerable market share to the road sector, dropping from about 40% half a century ago to less than 25% now, and is left carrying mostly captive commodities such as coal, limestone, bauxite, iron ore, foodgrains, etc, hoping to reach 944 million tonnes, the target proposed for the year ending March 31, 2011.
On the other hand, Chinese Railways, with just over 74,000 km of network, marginally larger than Indian Railways? 64,000 km, is already carrying over 2,700 million tonnes a year! The answer to this perhaps lies in the fact that although the passenger tariff is marginally higher, the number of passenger trains are much less and travel is restricted to once a year trip home.
Interestingly, in 2007, while Indian Railways registered 6,94,764 million passenger km, while the Chinese Railways registered only 6,89,618 million passenger km, even though the country?s network is much larger and it is a record holder for the world?s population at over 1.3 billion!
Of course, apart from almost the double the number of long distance passenger trains being run by Indian Railways, it is the comparative ease with which train tickets can be procured that makes all the difference, not to mention the rampant ticket-less travel in most parts of Bihar and UP.
Thanks to the world-class PRS (passenger reservation system), again introduced by Madhavrao Scindia in the late 1980?s, the system has grown exponentially, enabling tickets for reserved accommodation for over a million passengers a day being issued from its 8,169 terminals at 2,193 locations (including those for unreserved accommodation) across the country.
Given the urge to travel and the ease with which it can be done with innumerable trains to choose from, no wonder India?s teeming population is set to swamp the system. Now only if some one has the courage to hike the passenger tariff, turning a liability into an asset, and get the Railways? finances back into shape, to power its growth to handle higher levels of freight.
The author is a former member of the Railway Board