Derailment of
the prestigious New Delhi- Dibrugarh Rajdhani Express the other day near
Chhapra in Bihar is virtually a wake-up call for the Indian Railways and its
newly appointed minister. It is not yet certain what caused the accident that
reportedly took four lives. Whether it was sabotage or plain neglect and
incompetence on the part of the tracks inspection staff is yet to be
ascertained. Inquiries are going to be conducted but a later report said that
the Intelligence Bureau had sent an alert about a Maoist threat. The area is
Maoists-affected. Nonetheless, it
would be premature to arrive at any conclusion.
The fact,
however, remains that there have been far too many railway accidents of late.
This year alone has witnessed more than half a dozen accidents which have taken
many lives. If these occurred because of negligence, inadequacy of equipment
due to unavailability of funds or lack of supervision or monitoring, the
Railways will have to contend with them as soon as possible taking lessons from
the findings of the inquiries to allocate suitable financial, human, and
material resources. This is one aspect of railway accidents in India. The other
is terror. Terror lurks in this country almost at every bend of the road or a
railway track. It could generally be of Islamic variety or of Maoist type.
Acute watchfulness is necessary to ensure that they do not harm innocents
travelling in a train or wantonly destroy railway property. They are desperados
ruthlessly waging war against the State. Safety, therefore, has become an issue
of prime importance for the travelling public and the Railways will have to see
their way through to provide it.
We run a big
railway system, the fourth largest if one goes by track-kilometres. But that is
about all. It has only marginally improved since the British left and the
erstwhile railway companies were amalgamated into one monolith of Indian
Railways. Although considered the lifeline of the nation we failed to take railway
transport to a higher level efficiency as some others in Asia, especially China
and Japan, have done. We have always suffered from resource constraints. For
the last decade or so the populist budgets with no fare hikes in the face of
rising costs of inputs, particularly formulated by regional politicians who
happened to be at helm, have worsened the situation. Working only to nurse their respective
constituencies and handing out freebies to different sections of the
privileged, they neglected the railway finances and allowed them to go to seed.
Indians are,
therefore, unused to face railway fare hikes for quite some years. No wonder
there have been mass demonstrations against the recent hike announced by the
new Railway Minister – a virtual necessity to avoid complete “operational and
financial collapse”. The Opposition, the Congress party, is crying hoarse about
it but its protests, as in many cases, are hypocritical. The hike in the fares
was approved by the last Prime Minister but his minister was not man enough to
implement it. That is precisely why one tends to think that the Congress never
worked for betterment of the country; it only worked for votes.
With the
Rajdhani accident questions are, therefore, justifiably being asked whether the
fare hike would make railway travels safe. While no such guarantee can ever be
extended but the Railways have to give a serious look within to diagnose what
it really ails from. It has to look at the issues of repair, renewal and
upgrades in every aspect of its functioning that have remained unattended for a
long, long time. We had got a head start at the time of Independence when Japan
was recovering from the battering of the World War II and China was in the
midst of a revolution. And, yet in the 67 intervening years they have stolen
not a, but several marches on us, especially in the field of development of
railways and taking them to heights that we will take years to scale.
Nevertheless, efforts have to be made and these cannot, certainly, be populist.
The Indian
railways need enormous amounts of attention, upgrades and finances. All cannot
be attended to at once. One feels that it needs to prioritise and start working
on things that presently hurt the most. Everyone is talking about its
collapsing finances. Like the Union Government, it, too, has to start
economising. Last year Pawan Kumar Bansal, the Minister for Railways had
announced (DNA 26-02-2013) that as the organisation was staring at a loss of
24000 crores “austerity and economy” would be practised rigorously. No such
effort, however, ever hit the headlines. No effort was made to cut down and/or
improve the productivity of its 15 lakh personnel and no effort was made to
restrict the numbers of freeloaders who travel without paying a pie. Every
budget virtually has seen their ranks getting enlarged. One can imagine the
losses to the Railways if 15 lakh employees and an equal number of pensioners
travel free of cost on it every year. Privy purses of the princes were
abolished forty years ago but the erstwhile railway companies’ legacy of free
travel for railway employees, even post-retirement, continues till today. Is
there any logic?
Then, every budget has seen
introduction/extension of trains. Even Bansal, after talking of austerity
introduced 67 new express trains and 27 passenger trains. Whether necessary
traffic surveys were conducted for all of them is not known. From what happened
with the Bhopal-Indore double-decker train which, on introduction, was starved
of passengers and is yet to find a viable route to ply on, one would not be
sure. Conserving and optimal utilisation of the available resources should be
the watchword.
Today, with
several accidents in the recent past safety in the railway system has acquired
prime importance. There are two sources of threats – internal and external. One
is from within the railways because of failure or ageing of equipment,
carelessness, lack of commitment of workers and lack of modernisation.
Comparatively, the US and China have recorded far lesser numbers of accidents
than India. If and when the high speed trains become a reality safety on Indian
railways will have to measure up to the ultimate standard. The other source,
the external one, will have to be taken care of by utmost vigilance not only by
the railways’ own inspection and security establishments but also by other
available internal security forces. The elimination of terror on the tracks is
necessary.
The internal
governance of the railways will have to be tightened since that has direct
fallout on passengers’ facilities and conveniences. It cannot remain untouched
by the ‘Modi effect’ that has overtaken the Centre which has perked up its
offices, breathing new life into them. Sanitation, hygiene and other sundry
facilities including punctuality, as indeed the technology currently used, need
to be enormously upgraded.
The Indian
Railways need a change in its profile.
*The blog was written before the Railways budget was announed
Photo:From the
Internet
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