Two months ago, the Railway Board, the highest decision-making body of the Indian Railways, decided to preserve India’s first narrow gauge line between Dhaboi and Miyagam in Gujarat, a 33-km stretch part of an erstwhile network of over 200 km built in the 19th Century.
As part of the decision, the Western Railway was asked to reply to the ministry with comments on what kind of resources they would require for the job. The zonal railway did not reply. Instead, train operations on the line were suspended for local engineering work-related reasons last week.
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The 160-year-old Indian Railways has always found itself in a fix when it comes to preserving its heritage assets. For instance, around nine years ago, a controversy broke out after the Railway Board discovered that coaches that carried the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, and the engine that pulled the first-ever train in India, had been sold as scrap.
More recently, following an inspection by current Chairman Railway Board Ashwani Lohani, a railway heritage enthusiast, it was decided that the 133-year old Jubilee Bridge on the Hooghly in Kolkata would be preserved and the Howrah station complex would be integrated into a larger heritage conservation plan. But things haven’t moved.
Heritage conservation is not a core function. As a result, engineers, who are not given any formal orientation, lack the technical knowhow on how to identify and preserve what is worthy of heritage status. For instance, a civil engineer would look after fixed heritage assets such as buildings, tracks, bridges as a sideshow to his/her core duties.
This is unlike in, say, England, where conservation-worthy assets are handed over to societies such as the Railway Heritage Trust. Its yearly budget is around 3 million pounds though it has fewer assets than India.
Indian Railways has 34 big and small museums, apart from a large number of buildings, bridges and other assets that are still in use. Typically, the Railways spends around Rs 20-25 crore each year towards maintaining each hill railway.
In India, work on railway heritage depends largely on sporadic individual enthusiasm, passion and patronage.
Besides, local politicians across India are in the habit of demanding conversion of narrow gauge/meter gauge lines to broad gauge even if there is hardly any traffic to justify the demand.
In the meantime, the hunt for outside knowhow continues. A former regional director of the Archaeological Survey of India, K K Muhammed, has been made a mentor of the Nilgiri Mountain Railway and railway museums in Mysuru, Chennai and Trichy. Former financial commissioner of the Railway Board Sanjoy Mookerjee, another railway heritage expert by passion, too has been made a mentor. The ministry now regularly interacts with civil society groups such as the Indian Steam Railway Society and Railway Enthusiasts Society.
In the pecking order of priorities, however, the need to preserve history is in a constant fight with the pressing needs of running and upgrading the country’s railway system.
