It is unlikely that the railway minister will give any indication in her budget speech how she hopes to turn around the railways and make them a dynamic engine of Indias transport system. They need to transport much more than they do,yet severe capacity constraints are preventing them from doing so. With the economy growing near 9 per cent,Indian Railways need to grow at 11 per cent to keep pace. Unfortunately,IRs growth rate is about 5 per cent,resulting in a continuous fall in market share.
What is of deep concern is that even for the nine bulk commodities,where IR enjoys a natural advantage,roads move 50 per cent of bulk traffic against 47 per cent by rail. The share of passenger traffic too has steadily fallen. In 1950-51,it was 74 per cent; today,it is no more than 12 per cent. Even for environmental reasons the economy cannot sustain such movement away from rail to road. It also leads to congestion of already overburdened highways.
The Vision 2020 document presented to Parliament by Mamata Banerjee in 2009 recognises the need to add capacity and proposes to achieve this by doubling and quadrupling of lines,segregating passenger and freight movement on high-density routes and raising the present speed of trains from 110-130 kmph to 160-200 kmph. However,IR has failed to complete any substantial project in the last five years. The dedicated freight corridor was expected to be finished by 2011-12; but not a single kilometre of track has been constructed. IRs vision of building 25,000 km of new tracks by 2020 is unlikely to become reality simply because the Railway Board has failed to complete sanctioned projects and the ministry has been unsuccessful in generating the legal and economic conditions for attracting private capital. The PPP route for constructing new lines has failed to take off.
If new capacity is not brought on-line,as soon as possible,IR faces internal collapse. IR must get projects moving,so that in about five years the tide starts to turn. In the meantime the existing capacity has to be used more intensively. On all high-density routes the railways have installed automatic-colour light signalling. Chinese railways are able to utilise it to the extent of about 120 trains in 24 hours. IR has difficulty in running 70 to 80 trains every day.
There are three reasons for this. Unlike IR,they have no speed restrictions,which are typically imposed by track engineers to slow down trains when the condition of the track has deteriorated,making it unsafe for higher speeds. These are lifted once the track has been brought up to the proper condition. Second,locomotives,wagons,passenger coaches and signalling systems are extremely reliable,unlike on IR where failures are commonplace. Third,the operating culture is more disciplined. It collects all freight trains in a holding yard and then moves them in a convoy,in a three-hour daily band. The rest of the time is then available for passenger movement. They maintain very strict driver discipline. The driver is expected to be in the cab and push off the moment the signal turns green. They are thus able to utilise nearly every available path.
IR can do the same; however,they need to take some difficult policy decisions. Track and signalling maintenance resources will have to be deployed in a radically different manner so that a policy of no-speed-restriction becomes the norm. Similarly,maintenance quality will have to be upgraded.
However,the change that will bring in immediate and large gains is moving freight trains in convoys,for which yards have to be created capable of starting 10 to 11 trains in a span of 70 minutes or so. Presently,IR can start a maximum of four trains at a time. Drivers will have to be motivated to ensure that they do not waste any time in moving a train once the signal becomes green. By these simple and doable actions IR should be able to double the number of trains it moves over these sections.
Railway ministers have had the difficult task of balancing economic and political requirements and have been inclined to focus on the social aspects. The question of who will pay for the programmes can no longer be avoided; IR is reaching a state of collapse from years of inadequate investment. The real challenge before the railway minister and IR management is how to transform an essentially 19th century system into a 21st century railway.
The writer is a former general manager of Indian Railways
express@expressindia.com
