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.

Municipal decadence

I am writing this since I observed women in the early to late mornings sweeping roads in the Hyderabad city, municipal officers who have devised this employment generation scheme did not think for a moment the risk they are putting the women to. With poor street lights and rash driving they are often subject to accidents. For 3000 rs a month they are subject to dust pollution, high risk working conditions etc. Do we need to clean our roads at all most of them are broken anyways. Mal-administration, lack of innovation and poor execution ails our municipalities.

Municipal administration in the Indian towns and cities is a broken function. An important civil administration function neglected by the state and central governments. Indian towns and cities are a visual load of dirt and broken infrastructure.

I need not detail the deplorable hygienic conditions that exist of Indian towns and cities. The municipality’s in the country work in bits and pieces. It is amazing to see the consistency in municipal mal-administration across the length and breadth of the country (leave aside some towns here and there).

Indian towns and cities are densely populated and unplanned and that adds to the complexity of administering them. Having said that there is no serious attempt by the state and central governments to address the issues that plague city and town administrations in the country. We are not learning from other successful cities in the world.

We often attribute mediocrity in this country to the large population, complexity etc, more of an excuse to continue the status quo. Municipalities’ too claim the same and do not re-invent themselves.

It is time to turn our attention to our cities and towns which are growing bigger due to influx from villages, our cities will be unmanageable in a decade with the current structures. May be we need to have a relook at the governance model, are the elected municipal councils able to deliver or they have become obstructionist, do we need to privatize some or more of the city functions, do we need professionals to run our cities ?