What's ailing Indian railways

A train pulling into the Kanpur Central Railway Station in UP. With one of the world's largest rail networks in terms of passenger traffic, India’s priorities should be to build on this - particularly since rail is considered the most energy-efficient mode of transport for freight and passengers. (Photo by KpinfomediaIndia via Wikimedia Commons)

Indian railways is under the cosh following the horrific accident in Odisha in which 280 precious lives were lost. The worst such accident in the last two decades draws attention to the critical need for building more safety features into the network even as capacity expansion is accelerated.

The railways are the true lifeline of the country carrying over 20 million passengers daily. Sadly, they haven’t got the attention they deserve. An audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India last year revealed that the Rs 2.5 lakh crore spent on building the rail infrastructure over the last decade hasn’t been adequate to improve its “mobility outcomes.”

While a horrific accident is a terrible way to be reminded of its many deficiencies, some good may still come if the warnings it has served are heeded.

For starters there has to be a clear consensus about the role of railways in India’s transport mix. Notwithstanding the many new airports being built across the country, with one of the world's largest rail networks in terms of passenger traffic, India’s priorities should be to build on this particularly since rail is considered the most energy efficient mode of transport for freight and passengers. Other countries have paid a heavy price for promoting more expensive alternatives. Thus, in the US, the automobile lobby has ensured over the years that an inexpensive public transport system is missing in most small towns and even some of the largest cities.

In India the railways are an integral part of the growing work-related migration from villages and towns to bigger cities. That gives them political significance as well. Indeed, for many decades the railway ministry portfolio was one of the most coveted among political aspirants. Often coalition governments had to cede the railways portfolio to an influential partner. For instance, in 1999 when Mamata Banerjee joined the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government she was made Railways Minister. In 2009 she again took over as Railway Minister in the UPA-II government.

The challenge for the government has been to yank this vast network spanning a running track length of over 1,00,000 kilometers into the modern era, leaving behind the colonial legacy of overcrowded trains and poor facilities and dirty washrooms.

Make no mistake, India's railways is a colonial legacy which was set up by the British purely to further their own interests of trade, commerce, military and personal mobility. In a piece for The Guardian in 2017 Shashi Tharoor writes, "In their very conception and construction, the Indian railways were a colonial scam." He quotes Governor General Lord Hardinge who argued in 1843 that the railways would be beneficial “to the commerce, government and military control of the country”.

In his book India Moving, author and academic Chinmay Tumbe gives further insight into how the growth of passenger travel on the rail network belied British expectations that most of the revenues from railway service would be drawn from goods traffic. Annual passenger traffic grew exponentially from 13 million in 1865 to over a billion by 1946. Not that this drove the British to improve the conditions of travel. Tumbe writes that "90% of passengers travelled in badly ventilated third-class carriages tolerating the congestion in reward for speed."

What India inherited in 1947 was this self-seeking network whose very construct favoured a handful of white people to the malignant neglect of the millions who travelled in overcrowded compartments where conveniences were not fit even for herding animals. Forget those Raj nostalgia-induced images of elegant ladies in ornamental coupes. For the vast majority, rail travel was an evil necessity. Much of that continued till recently. The super rich in India have their private jets while the rich use commercial air travel. But for the vast majority there has been only the daunting option of unreserved travel in trains purely because it is so much cheaper.

Even in the train accident in Odisha, one of the trains involved, the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, was carrying 994 reserved and around 300 unreserved passengers. Many of the deaths occurred in the unreserved coaches, and while that is merely a reflection of the way the crash transpired, what is truly tragic is that the railway authorities conceded it would take some time to ascertain the identity of these passengers since there are no details available about them.

It is time railway passengers are given their due importance.