Chinese Railways

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Tracks cascading down from Beijing Railway Station

We in India are far too late in modernizing the railways and introducing high speed trains and. Politics and corruption has held us back and has pushed us back along with backward economies which have railways. Whether European, American, Japanese, Koreans or Chinese railways, we are far behind them and it will take decades to even come anywhere near them. One would like to add that even Malaysia has stolen a march over us.

Another view of  Beijing Railway Station

 For the first time in decades PM Modi, in active collaboration with a brilliant Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu, is trying to lift the Railways from the morass it has got bogged down in. And yet there is no shortage of critics. For years ministers of railways not only used the ministry as a political tool and garner votes. Budget after budget it was populism that ruled with no steps for lifting up this massive asset of the country.

Nose like that of a aircraft

If one looks at the inese Railways one would realize what the Chinese have achieved in thirty years. I had occasion to travel in Chinese Railways in 1982, though for short distances, they were no better than our railways. The coaches used to be imported from the communist-ruled East Germany. Nonetheless, services for

Cabins too like those in aircraft

the passengers were of a much higher order. I had occasion to seeeven the Shanghai Railway Station. It was not even like our VT but there was a huge lounge with sofa sets and their crocheted toppings. Wall to wall Chinese paintings dominated the hall. No

Seats exuding luxury

clutter of baggage as baggage had to be booked in what we call brake vans.

The change that we see in pictures today is so remarkable. Not only are the Chinese gloating over a futuristic railways that they have, they have become consultants for others, including us. I am putting up a few photographs of Chinese railways for friends to see. All of these have been taken from the internet. Take a look.  

*As indicated in the text all photos are from internet

Shape of things to come - in Indian Railways?

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Tracks fanning out of Beijing Railway Station

A recent news item indicated that the Chinese are coming to take a look at the Indian Railways and suggest ways and means to improve it in most of its aspects. A week or two earlier a 22-member delegation headed by the Deputy Administrator of the National Railway Administration Zheng Jian held talks with the top brass of the Central Railways at Mumbai

Nose like that of an aircraft

While there are numerous other countries which have developed and modernised their respective railway systems – France and Japan to name only two – perhaps pitching on China would be the right thing to do. Thirty years ago the Chinese Railways system was no better than ours as it is today. I had had occasion to

Sleeperette  seats

see it myself in 1982. But today they have a whole network of swanky bullet trains running at 300 kms per hour. They have gone through the whole gamut of processes for lifting up standards and modernisation of the System and the work is still on. The fast paced development was aided by accumulation of huge amounts of forex reserves and an authoritarian regime. Nonetheless, in our case, too, a beginning has

Stewardesses

to be made - sooner the better. Our Railways have been milked by the politicians in our self-destructive, chaotic democracy for so long that it had actually been brought down to the edge of a precipice.

The report hoped that a MoU might be signed in this regard when the Chinese President comes to India on a visit in September next.  The photographs sent to me by a friend are also posted. One wonders whether one would be journeying on such a train in this country any time soon. Not in my lifetime anyway!

Will it be like what we see here?

Indian Railways need a makeover*

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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