Indian Railways, Its Budget, and Aam Admi's Travel

There has never been such a bad time and good time to write an article about politics in India.  Good time because there is no dearth of issues.  When I took to write this article, Dinesh Trivedi had been sacked as railway minister and press reported that Mamta Banerjee has asked prime minister to replace him with Mukul Roy.  Then in the morning, things changed and now they say he is still in chair.  Minutes after Akhilesh Yadav took oath as the youngest chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, there was a ruckus on the same stage and an unruly gathering made chaos.  Bad time because you cannot focus on the event, which you are writing about.

Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi presented his budget where in he proposed to raise rail fares across all classes.  Safety as recommended by the Anil Kakodkar Committee was the main focus area.  The budget, as many did say, was very bold.  The financial health of Indian Railways has not been very good since over the past decade there has not been any increase in fares. On the other hand, costs have gone up significantly.

Indian Railways has become a toy in the hands of the politicians that they use for their own benefit.  During last one decade, there has been mushroom growth of new passenger trains on an already insufficient rail infrastructure in the country.  During last five years, addition of more than five hundred new trains, increasing the frequency of trains and adding more coaches per train has left Indian Railways in a tight spot. Today, IR needs spare capacity.  Such a massive addition of passenger trains every year without any serious thought, mainly on political consideration, has severe implications on safety preparedness of railways. Further, neither any system or mechanism exists to evaluate safety risk of such uncoordinated measures nor has any effort been undertaken to ameliorate the worsening conditions created by such an act.

The proposed investment on safety as per the High Level Safety Review Committee for five years is more than 1 lakh crores.  Indian Railways needs to improve its finances in order to implement those recommendations.

Indian Railways transports more than 20 million passengers and 2 million tons of freight on a daily basis.  It has a network that is spread across the length and breadth of our country comprising close to 65,000 route kilometers.  More than that, it has a strong workforce of close to 14 lakh employees.  Therefore we cannot ignore the needs of this organization for a protracted period of time.

Today, IR enjoys less than 12% market share of India’s total passenger traffic.  To improve on this front, there are several other measures that need to be taken such as separation of passenger and freight businesses, discourage short-distance passenger, reduce travel time, increase service speed, and reduce train stops.  It also needs to work on problem-free ticketing and reservation, improve its safety, security, and hygiene standards.  It has to improve on reliability with timely arrival and departure of its trains to repose faith.

Those who oppose the fare hike should also realize that today’s aam admi is not that aam and demands better service too.