On The spot
Tavleen Singh
On the morning of the railway accident near Chhapra last Wednesday TV news anchors, especially on the Hindi channels, went slightly nuts. They connected the accident, which may have been an act of Maoist terrorism, to the recent rise in the price of railway tickets and freight transport announced by the new Minister of Railways. And, charged the Minister with betraying the ‘common man’. Here I quote verbatim what a lady anchor said, ‘The Government has raised the price of tickets by 14% on the grounds that passengers will be provided with better services and better security but this accident is proof that the burden of paying more should not be imposed on the common man. He now pays almost as much for a railway ticket as he pays for an air ticket and he cannot even be guaranteed safety.’
What this lady and her comrades on television choose not to mention is that it is because the railways have failed to raise the price of passenger travel and freight for more than a decade that it is unable to provide better services. It is because fares are not increased regularly that they have gone up steeply now. When it comes to Railway Budgets populism always wins. The most famous example of this came in 2012 when the hysterically populist Chief Minister of West Bengal ordered the Prime Minister to sack Dinesh Trivedi as Railway Minister because he dared to try and raise fares by between 2 paise and 30 paise a kilometer. Her Trinamul Congress was part of the Central Government at the time and the Minister was one of hers. The Prime Minister was controlled by Sonia Gandhi whose populist ideas exceed the wildest dreams of Ms Bannerjee so he was forced to comply. But, the 14% increase was what even Soniaji would have been forced to order if her Government had been voted back this time. The new Railway Minister has made it clear that he is implementing something that his predecessor had said was necessary.
It is because of populism of the worst kind that the Indian Railways have gone from being among the finest and grandest in the world to being the worst and most unsafe today. Populist railway Ministers have so mismanaged the Railway Budget that there has not been any money left for expansion, modernization or anything. So in the 67 years since the British left Indian Railway Ministers have added only a miniscule amount of new track despite passenger travel having gone up six fold since 1947. Independent India inherited 55,000 route kilometres of track and today this figure stands at 63,000 route kilometres to serve 24 million passengers daily. Compare this with China’s record. In 1947 it had 27,000 route kilometres of track and today this figure is 78,000 route kilometres. But, this is only part of the great Chinese railway success story.
On a visit to China in 2010 I took the train from Tianjin to Beijing and got there in thirty minutes (a distance of 130 kilometres) because the train traveled at more than 300 kilometres an hour. China now has trains that travel at such speeds across the length and breadth of the country and this means that in terms of rail travel it is about fifty years ahead of India. It is not just the speed of Chinese trains that fascinated me when I was there but everything about rail travel in that country. The Railway Stations are more modern than most that I have seen in Europe or America and on par with the newest airports in India in terms of services.
At Tianjin Railway Station where I had some time to kill I drank excellent coffee in an attractive café and inspected a menu for fine dining in a nearby restaurant. And, there were bars and shops that I could have explored had I wanted. The Chinese appear to have noticed long ago that railway stations can be used to build more than passenger waiting rooms so there are shops, restaurants and hotels in which travelers can while away the time and add to railway coffers by spending their hard earned money. At Tianjin Railway Station I remembered sadly our own railway platforms covered in travelers sleeping, eating and waiting with their baggage on the floor and I remembered the smell of human excrement and rotting garbage that hangs over Indian railway stations like a disease filled pall.
It was not always this way. Train travel in India was once long ago a wonderfully, romantic experience but this was before populist railway budgets wrecked everything. Once upon a long ago time railway hotels provided excellent services and were filled with old-fashioned charm. So travelers, including your columnist, often chose to stay in them instead of seeking out a hotel in the city. Some of these old railway hotels still exist and if they were restored could be as popular as the magnificent railway hotel I visited in the seaside resort of Hua Hin in Thailand. This hotel is run by the Sofitel group and is so wonderfully restored that it lures more travelers in this former private seaside resort of the King of Thailand than the newer hotels further up the beach.
Why can we not restore our old railway hotels? Why can the railways not make better use of the very expensive urban land that it owns? Why cannot Indian trains at least have proper toilets instead of holes in the ground that scatter excrement and disease across the length and breadth of India wherever our trains travel? Why cannot railway safety standards be improved? Why cannot railway passengers get better food? There is a single answer to all these questions: populism.
The railways cannot be financed by populism and good intentions they need money for maintenance and modernization. This will only become available when Indian journalists as well as ordinary citizens realize that they cannot become hysterical every time the price of tickets goes up. This is what always happens so Railway Ministers usually end up rolling back fare increases as has happened this time in Mumbai under political pressure. This metropolis has more daily commuters than any other Indian city and these commuters complain routinely of bad services and crowded compartments. Why should they have the right to do this when they are unprepared to pay for better services? It is the same story across India and the result is that Indian Railway Services are today decades behind the rest of the world.
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