Now that some time has elapsed after the dreadful Odisha train accident, it’s appropriate to take less emotional stock. My credentials to do so are that between 1998 and 2018 I worked as an intermittent consultant to a well-known transport institute in Delhi.
It was staffed then, and still is, almost entirely by retired officers of the Indian Railways who had held posts on the Railway Board or equivalent. So they all knew what they were talking about. I was the fly on the wall, listening intently.
The railwaymen — there were no women for some reason — agreed on just one thing: that the Railways in India after 1971 had become primarily an instrument of politics, what economists call a ‘binding constraint’.
Why 1971? Because it was the year Indira Gandhi won her famous victory in the general election and changed the meaning of distribution as firmly as Narendra Modi has changed the meaning of secularism since 2014. It was a ‘paradigm shift’.
Distribution in economics until 1971 had a different meaning. Welfarism wasn’t a part of it. Indeed, compassion as a variable wasn’t either.
The unvarnished truth
Since then, in India, the term ‘social justice’ has been added to it. So now, where the Railways is concerned, it means commercial foolishness that benefits mainly individual politicians and sometimes political parties. That’s the unvarnished truth.
In the process the Railways has become become what’s called a quasi public good in economics or what the Punjabis call “aadha teetar, aadha batayr” (half partridge, half quail), meaning neither fish nor fowl.
Public goods are those goods which when consumed by one person does not reduce the supply for someone else and also the marginal cost of producing an extra unit of which is zero.
Quasi public goods are those that the politicians designate as such being public goods. It’s a nonsensical concept devised to justify subsidies to activities that carry political benefits. You can see the consequences of this in all manner of things from rail safety to the quality of services to the finances to the HR disasters, etc. The sad thing is that the Modi government has been focused on just one thing: the quality of services from better stations to faster trains.
It has steadfastly refused to turn it into a full commercial service and it remains aadha teetar, aadha batayr. The BJP has continued with Congress policies while proclaiming the opposite.
The details may be different but the overall approach is identical: use the Railways as an instrument of politics first and then as a carrier of people and freight.
Ignore commercial considerations and focus on political benefits.
However, it is also true that politicians have to strike an acceptable balance between demand and supply. But in India it has been done in a shockingly political manner.
The speed factor
That said, since the provocation for this article is the triple train crash near Balasore, Odisha, let me just focus on what the railwaymen at the institute kept emphasising: the existing rail network is not capable of handling speeds that vary between 40 kmph and 130 kmph.
You can do it for sometime but sooner or later you will come a-cropper. I asked them if that meant if there has to be a drop from 130 kmph to, say, 100 kmph. There was near unanimity on this. The existing network can’t bear the load of extra haulage and greater speeds. You don’t need anything more than common sense to see this.
The solution, therefore, is to slow all trains down for more haulage capacity which is more important than trains that save you a couple of hours at best — if they run on time. That’s the trade-off. This government’s fascination for speed is prone to accidents. The model should actually be the Mumbai suburban system, namely, lots of carriage at slow speeds. There are lots of technical and operational reasons that are well known. So I won’t list them here.
Suffice it to say that the existing capacities of rakes, locomotives, tracks, signalling, finance, technology, management, HR and other things are inadequate to handle higher haulage at higher speeds.
Investments must jump
Or, if these are to be achieved, which is a desirable goal in itself, the investment in the Railways has to be increased manifold, perhaps quadrupled over the next 15 years.
Dedicated tracks are the way to go where slow and fast trains don’t have to run on the same old tracks.
But here’s the catch: the investment can’t be increased if everything about the Railways is primarily political. Modi has now had four rail ministers but the government’s basic approach has remained the same.