Rail Tamasha

Rail budget every year is a tamasha of sorts, the intent of the budget seems to be to impress the middle and lower class voters with favorable announcements (I have not included the upper class since they do not care much for Rail travel). The entire budget exercise is more a rhetoric flourish than actual intent to improve the Rail services in the country.

Rail Ministers take the budget exercise as an opportunity to announce more trains since they make good headlines. The already beaten down infrastructure doesn’t matter, some of these new trains are obviously accommodated due to political pressure and do not live to see the day due to economics ( It will be interesting to see the data on how many new trains announced over the past 5 years have been cancelled due to economics)

I need to acknowledge the schedule adherence has improved but the overall experience of travelling on the Indian Railways is nowhere close to what we can call a decent service. 25 million citizens use the service on a daily basis. Leaving china this should be much more volume of Rail travel than any other continent.

For this scale the opportunity to expand and improve all round Infrastructure is tremendous. This will happen when the Railways shift their thinking from running train and good services purely from revenue earning perspective and put the passenger in the scheme of things.

I am not sure if we yet have a role model Railway station in the country, the one which has easy accessibility to all platforms, tracks without fecal discharges, general cleanliness and orderliness. First things first Railways need to get the technology of collecting and safe discharge of human waste in the trains and stations, it is the ugliest site and a sad story about lack of thinking from Indian Railways from a public health view point (there are reports attempts have been made but discarded due to high cost, it means nothing since public health is more important than cost to Railways).

Investments in track infrastructure for high speed trains, signaling and other safety measures and modern stations should be the priority for Indian Railways. They should not forget that the Airports in the country which used to be grazing fields have slowly transformed themselves into world class facilities, the railways need to get private players into the act. While doing this they should not forget the poor porter, can we get the poor guy equipment to take goods around. Railways we are in the 21st century wake up.

Adding more and more trains to the already ageing infrastructure will only add more problems to commuters in terms of slow speeds and later running of trains, safety issues, fuel inefficiency and man-hour losses, handling of trains in outer etc. Our representatives and officials ought to draft their necessities and prioritize the list in the best interests of the citizens and the country.