Tehelka - India's Independent Weekly News Magazine
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WHAT AILS Indian Railways? The diagnosis can be made by looking at four broad-sweep parameters:
"¢ It is overstaffed and has a far greater employee and wages burden than is warranted. What's more — no railway minister wants to rectify this.
"¢ It is not focussing on its core area — transporting goods and people across long distances — and is side-tracked by short-distance, uneconomical and unnecessary routes as well as a suburban rail network that should be run by city and state authorities rather than the national railway. Even outsourcing of catering operations is deemed politically incorrect and creates a behemoth that ends up going nowhere.
"¢ Since it lives such a hand-to-mouth existence, existing from railway budget to railway budget and from railway minister's whimsy to railway minister's fancy, Indian Railways has little time and money for strategic thinking, visionary planning and spending on technological upgrade. The best illustration of this is that the Vivek Express, the train that links India's Northeast to the southern ocean, travels at an average of 51 kmph. At a time when China is building an inter-city high-speed railway network with speeds of 350 kmph, this doesn't seem ordinary, it seems obsolete.
"¢ As a result of all this, the Railways finds itself out of tune with the needs of Indian business travellers and stakeholders — increasingly irrelevant to a growing industrial economy precisely at a time when the opportunities before it are bigger than ever before.
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WHAT SHOULD be the core area of focus for Indian Railways? It has an expansive network of 7,083 railway stations and 131,205 railway bridges — a quarter of these bridges are over a century old, but that's another matter — and 19,000 km of track. Is all of this equally important? According to the Expert Group for Modernisation of Indian Railways headed by Sam Pitroda — it submitted its report to Trivedi on 25 February, in his final weeks as minister — "40 percent of the total network"¦ [is] carrying about 80 percent of the traffic".
This super-busy part of the network includes what Railways officials call the "arterial routes" — the "golden quadrilateral" linking Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, and the "two diagonals" that run from Delhi to Chennai and Kolkata to Mumbai and criss-cross the quadrilateral. The four mega-cities and the connections between them actually make up no more than 16 percent of the Railways' infrastructure network — but contribute to 60 percent of the traffic.
Logically, if Indian Railways were run like a business corporation, it would channel its energies in this area. It would invest in, for instance, signalling technology that would allow it to run trains more frequently, and closer to each other in terms of time and distance, than is possible today. The Pitroda Committee even discussed the idea of investing in signalling and tracks and allowing private companies to run their own trains, to complement Indian Railways trains while paying user charges.
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FRANKLY, THE biggest curse afflicting the Indian Railways is the anachronistic existence of a railway budget, which has been separate from the general budget since 1924. It serves no purpose as outlays for it come out of the Consolidated Fund of India and can be incorporated in the general budget speech. Fare hikes or freight charge revisions in the Railways do not need Parliamentary approval. Indeed even a divisional officer — let alone a member of the Railway Board — has the authority to quote and negotiate freight rates.
So what does the railway budget do? Willy-nilly it becomes a platform for distributing political favours. New trains and out-of-the-blue stations may not be economically viable or even socially necessary — but who will dare deny a powerful MP or an allied party the right to boast to voters and make a symbolic statement? In the run-up to the railway budget of 2012, Trivedi is believed to have received 5,000 suggestions from "brother MPs".
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Pitroda has also sought commercial exploitation of Indian Railways' property and stations using public-private partnerships, as well as modern signalling and introduction of high-speed locomotives on key routes. This will cost money. The proposed 350 kmph, high-speed train link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad will be built over 10 years and cost Rs 60,000 crore. The Pitroda Committee wants the model to be replicated on six other routes, including Delhi-Patna (991 km) and Chennai-Bengaluru-Coimbatore-Ernakulam (850 km). The abolition of all level crossings, another proposal, will cost Rs 50,000 crore.
Implementing the Pitroda report will require Rs 8.4 lakh crore over five years. It is only possible with large-scale private partnerships and even outright privatisation that the Railway Modernisation Group suggests but which the UPA government — whether the allies or even the Congress party itself — would be hostile to. Indeed, it is difficult to see any Indian political party completely buying into the Pitroda blueprint. In addition, there is the Anil Kakodkar Committee on safety that wants Rs 1 lakh crore spent on safety mechanisms over five years (though some of its proposals overlap with Pitroda's).
That is the dream, where is reality? Frankly, are those gargantuan numbers, running into hundreds of thousands of crores, even conceivable? If Indian Railways finds its pension bill pressing, can it afford such massive infrastructural investments? After all, Rs 60,000 crore is the annual plan outlay for Indian Railways in 2012-13, and it is the highest ever!
There are other factors. The political class would be loath to reduce the employment potential of Indian Railways without the guarantee that those who don't get these jobs will be absorbed elsewhere. On the other hand, there is the fear that if nothing is done, Indian Railways will go the Air-India way. Conservative voices argue that if too much is done, it could go the Kingfisher Airlines way.
The debate is endless. Nevertheless, without a radical transformation in the manner in which Indian Railways is managed — and without bringing in a rational measure of private players as partners — India's rail story will keep going downhill. The point is: can the new railway minister, Mukul Roy, see the lantern waving furiously in the distance?