Apart from holding routine enquiries into rail accidents, the Railways does little to ensure passenger safety. Rail accidents seem to be taking place more frequently and routinely, with impunity. No one except those unfortunate victims and their families truly appears to be in agony. Alongside accidents, the Railways seem to have gone totally berserk about the train time tables, including even those most so-called prestigious trains where upper class rail fares compare with air fares for similar distances. January, 2017, witnessed the worst records of train schedules. Most long distance trains, including Rajdhani Express and Duranto, ran 10 to 20 hours late from their normal schedule. To give a specific example, on January 7-8, Patna Rajdhani ran 21 hours behind schedule, Sampurna Kranti Express, 22 hours behind schedule, Bhubaneswar Rajdhani 19 hours behind schedule, Sealdah Rajdhani 12 hours behind schedule. The story is common almost through the entire month for all major trains, connecting India’s metro cities. The Railways routinely blamed them on ‘fog’ conditions despite the fact that the maximum speed limit for even Rajdhani Express, in normal times, is only 130 kms per hour though the average speed works out less than 85 kms per hour. Fog conditions alone on trunk routes hardly slow them down. Incidentally, winter fog conditions on India’s four major metropolitan city trunk routes are hardly comparable with that in the United Kingdom or in Europe where technically geared fast trains run at a much higher speed through dense fog and rains. The Railways may differ, poor traffic management is primarily responsible for the railway time schedule often going haywire.

Unfortunately, few railway ministers, except probably the Late Lal Bahadur Shastri, paid much attention to rail safety and time tables. Shastri had even resigned from the ministry taking the blame of a train accident on himself. Such instances are rare for modern day ministers. Often guided by bureaucrats, ministers are more happy to talk about revenue prospects of their departments than about serving people, for whose benefit these departments are created. While services provided to train passengers are deteriorating by day, the railway management is said to be toying with such absurd ideas as renting out railway platforms and waiting rooms for parties in odd hours or branding trains like Coca-Cola Rajdhani, Pepsi Duranto, Lux G T Express, or, Airtel Shabdi to mop up extra revenue for the Railways. Few in the railway management care for passenger comfort while they are more comfortable about talking on the railways’ digitisation programme, probably meant to please the Prime Minister. Even in New Delhi railway station platforms, there are not enough sitting arrangements for passengers. Waiting rooms are overcrowded and their attached toilets often stink. The facilities available for passengers are in bad shape for want of supervision despite the creation of new posts like ‘Station Directors’. The public announcement system rarely provide correct information about the arrival and departure of a train, when it runs far behind its schedule.

The massive monopolistic nature of operation of Indian Railways may be largely responsible for the falling safety records, sloppy technological revamps, deteriorating time schedule and poor service standards. The government department, which is ordained to interact with the public daily, almost every minute or every hour, has become too big and unwieldy to be managed by a bunch of railway board members and ministers. The ministers often work as departmental top dogs under the famous Peter’s Principle who see things not through their eyes but through their ears.

In fact, it could be a major political blunder on the part of the government if the operation of the country’s largest single public transport service such as the railways is still run by a department. Post the 2017-18 budget, the government will do well to convert railway operation into a listed public sector enterprise. It can operate as a holding company such as Coal India Limited with regional rail services operating as subsidiaries. Interestingly, the Ministry of Railways has over a dozen departmental PSEs, operating in India as also abroad by some, with impeccable track records. There is no reason why the world’s largest railway service should be run under an archaic government department. Instead, with all probability, the regional railway companies are expected to offer much better services by competing with themselves and managing their resources at peak levels to reflect on their bottom lines. They will cut operational costs, rationalise employment, improve productivity and generate surplus for modernisation. Finally, this will help both the government and the railway service users. (IPA Service)