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The great railway turnaround is half a myth. None should grudge the Indian railways their day in the sun but it is necessary not to overdo the hype as that will inevitably lead to a downside later.
Also, it is necessary to direct praise where it is really due so as not to skew priorities. The great showman and master politician Lalu Prasad is basking in the glory of having done a stupendous turnaround job at the railways. The truth is that he has certainly turned things around but it would be wrong to imagine that the railways never did better.
The railways have been on an upward curve since 2002-03. The operating ratio, the share of revenue that is consumed by operating expenses (the lower it is the better), has been improving since then, but the current minister came in over a year later.
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The same story is told by another key ratio, net revenue to capital-at-charge, which gives a measure of the return the goverment gets on its funds invested in the railways. As the same table shows, the really golden age of the Indian railways since reforms began (assuming that the pre- and post-reform periods are not comparable) was 1994-96.
Both the ratios were far better than they are now. The ministers in charge during the period were CK Jaffer Sharief and Ram Vilas Paswan. Who would like to claim that they provided the railways with the best leadership in the last 15 years?
The lesson should be clear. It doesn't matter who leads the railways; when the economy booms the railways boom. To be fair to Lalu Prasad, he has made a contribution. He has been particularly good in leading the current turnaround by putting capable officials in place and letting them run the show.
With results that are there for all to see. His master stroke has been to bring in an outsider, IAS officer Sudhir Kumar. He has been able to use the ministerial authority seen to be behind him to ram down throats reforms which have been long discussed within the railways but never initiated because of inter-departmental non-cooperation, the bane of the railways.
The foremost positive change, as is well-known, has been to allow every wagon to carry 6 tonnes more than 58 tonnes of freight (carrying capacity plus eight tonnes instead of the earlier two).
The railways are not really carrying more per wagon. With systematic overloading, they were carrying about the same but not charging for the excess carriage. This effective enhancement of capacity utilisation, accompanied by a lowering of freight rates and allowing volume discounts (this ante-dates Lalu Prasad), has particularly benefited bulk material handlers like the steel industry.
In the process "freight offerings" to the railways have improved dramatially, halting the long-term downward trend in the railways' share of national haulage, compared to what goes by road. Plus, of course, the booming economy has given an additional push.
It is necessary to avoid undue hype because that distracts attention. If your ear is too closely geared to the applause there will be a tendency to go in for glamorous new initiatives which will at best affect operations at the margin but divert attention from more basic but vital improvements waiting to happen for decades. Take the case of super-fast passenger corridors like Mumbai-Pune and Bangalore-Chennai, which are being actively considered.
Here is what the railways themselves said in their status paper published in 2002. "Such projects are highly cost-intensiveĀ The pricing and patronisation are interconnected but still [the] pricing of such services is expected to be quite high. [The] IR cannot fund such projects from its own sources.
Whether such projects should be taken up at all? Who should fund it? Should this passenger business be de-regulated?" Even if these issues have been satisfactorily sorted out, there should be no doubt that such projects will be only peripheral to the railways' main concerns.
The topmost concern for the railways remains safety. The accident record over the last few years has consistently improved but there remains an unfinished agenda. Another key agenda, which has been addressed far less, is timeliness.
Official statistics in this regard are meaningless and anecdotal evidence is contradictory. In a way, both the issues can be addressed by improving the work culture and following more strictly the laid- down procedures. Plus, the railways have to do something about cleanliness. Most railway stations and trains are filthy most of the time. This agenda has hardly been addressed.
My family and I boarded a Rajdhani Express for Kolkata from New Delhi station in July, which started over an hour late. We came on time and waited and sweated it out on a crowded filthy platform amidst overpowering stench.
And on the way to the platform we passed huge queues of passengers waiting and sweating it out to buy tickets from a railway which is plagued by ticketless travel. You need applause to perk you up but first things come first.
