Any body listening???

Now you all can make out what damn concern our ministries have for the comfort of the public and efficiency et al.. . mind boggling. Repeated letters to the rail bhavan are still not responded to. As usual i keep writing to most ministries on all matters of disgust. Even if we want to be half a good as shinkasen it will take us atleast 10 decades and by then the traction systems would have worn out completelty so in effect we can never attain those levels. This nation is a real phenomenon.

Loknath Rao
Mumbai, India

And wondering wouldn’t it be hard to convince the technology/economy side of aspects to the decision makers like Lalu Prasad Yadav who can hardly read/write and wants all special trains should pass through Bihar (he made most of super fast trains to stop in every village of Bihar enroute to Delhi and Kolkata).

But our railway system also requires massive investments. We are working with the Japanese government to draw up a program in which the freight corridors between Mumbai1–Delhi, Mumbai–Chennai,2 and Delhi–Kolkata3 can be modernized. Our estimate is that that will cost about 25 thousand crore of rupees [$5.7 billion], and that’s our high priority as far as the railway system is concerned.

A good idea.

I think India needs to think about other ways of solving its intra-city transportation system too.

Coming to Bombay to Adelaide has been a shock.

One of the good thinsg of Adelaide is the decent public transport system considering that most of the Australians own a car.

They have a system called the o-Bahn, which is based fomr germany.

This is a cost-effective environmentally freindly systemm.

A bus which runs normally on the road, shifts to a concrete track and travels at 100km/hr and the comes to a normla road.

It has provided entire suburbs to be accessible from the city.

BTW, your IRTS is a good idea. I def. think somebody should take it up and brush up the numbers and costs.

Suhit

I think I read somewhere that the Railways is the largest employer in India, and while they have corporatised some parts (The IRCTC) the rest will, I fear remain in government hands, especially with the current lot of filthy disgusting communists.

I envisioned privatising some of the “luxury trains” off first as well – the Shatabdis and Rajdhanis…as these are stupidly considered “only for the rich”.

Nice ideas in paper. The railway version of Golden Quadrilateral(GQ)?

I think the problem will be patronage.
Indian middle class generally opt for cheaper things, however bad the quality may be.

Please explain how revenue can be generated for this.

I agree with you that India currently stands for it outsourcing service, for it’s BPO and perhaps for individuals who are doing good “abroad”. All reasons enough for why we skipped the manufacturing phase and jumped to being a service country. Also currently India needs a good RISC model (just downloaded and reading the RISC white paper) and communications should be a part of the infrastructure and not considered as a whole and soul tool which will lead India from a developing to a developed nation.

But frankly I have some issues with the Rail system you have proposed, currently the Railways cater to millions of people who travel from variety of destinations to a variety of destinations, It is a known fact that Indian Railways are the biggest and best railway systems in the country considering the amount of traffic they carry. How many people travel between Bombay and Delhi?! as compared to say Bombay and Pune/Baroda which shall justify such implementation of such a system.

Also current railways are heavily subsidised and private/public partnership would imply tickets to be on the expensive side.

Air is currently becoming cheaper day by day and is favourable atleast for personal travel. For Goods Transportation, perhaps we can look at importing Carrier Airbuses or building planes which can carry a good bulk of goods.

1. Indian railway system is in comparatively better situation than others like road etc, it has vast network, reliable and most importantly cost effective for poor people.

The fact that roads are in a worse condition than rails is not an argument against making the rail system as efficient as possible. Indeed, if the rail system is improved, then the pressure on the roads will decrease and make it easier to fix.

The Indian rail system is not as vast as it has been touted to be. Whenever we talk of India, we should try to put it in perspective by “normalizing” the figures. More about this later.

2. Public/private partnership is very diificult at a large scale as its the largest employer in India, heavily subsidised and there is a lot of organisation legacy…I think we need massive reforms in the way the system is governed before opening it up. There are no such issues for Road/Air.

Organizational legacy, is another of saying that we have been saddled with a dysfunctional system which we cannot hope to change thanks to the corruption and the nepotism introduced by Nehru.

3. Implementaion/Gestatation period for any such system will be much more than the Road/Air system.

A man goes to learn a language and the teacher says it will take ten years of work. The man says he would not do it. The teacher says, “Ten years from now, it will still take you ten years to learn the language.”

It is not how long it will take; the matter is whether it is worth doing. If it is, then it will take whatever time it takes. If it is not worth doing, it is not worth doing even if it takes no time to do it.

The argument that it is better to do something that is easy is like the drunk looking for his lost keys under the lamppost. He did not lose it there but it is easier to look for keys under the light, he reasons.

I feel in long run if fossil fuels make it extremely expensive for us to make use of road networks…alternate indigenous technologies will develop to make use of electricity, bio/natural gas in road transportation.

Road transportation does not have the scale economies that rails have. More about this in a followup post.

When I visited Swiss, I was overawed with the discipline it runs.. on the otherhand, I felt bad about the Indian trains.

I wonder how all the train stations are synchronised with clock running here (to a second accuracy)and the trains follow it meticulously.
http://mct.sbb.ch/mct/infrastruktur.htm

They also build the moutain trains to Jungfrau and Titlis. It climbs wonderfully at such treacherous altitudes.

My friend also told me about the fantastic fast train network in Sweden.
Sure you must be knowing more from Finland. How is it Nordic Countries ?
(though with very less population compared to India)

It high time Govt recogonises this as our Manufacturing sector growth is highly dependent on this logistics

You might also wonder how “well off” Indian folks are callous about the suffering of others. The lack of empathy just baffles me to no end.

Thanks for putting this post together…. , Navin

1. Indian railway system is in comparatively better situation than others like road etc, it has vast network, reliable and most importantly cost effective for poor people.

2. Public/private partnership is very diificult at a large scale as its the largest employer in India, heavily subsidised and there is a lot of organisation legacy…I think we need massive reforms in the way the system is governed before opening it up. There are no such issues for Road/Air.

3. Implementaion/Gestatation period for any such system will be much more than the Road/Air system.

I feel in long run if fossil fuels make it extremely expensive for us to make use of road networks…alternate indigenous technologies will develop to make use of electricity, bio/natural gas in road transportation.

I sometimes get the feeling the unwillingness to make big ticket infrastructure investments comes from a certain fear about running big budget deficits, or maybe from an under-appreciation of the secondary benefits. W.r.t infrastructure, that’s mistaken.

There is of course the problem of chronic mismanagement (bar a few exceptions such as the Delhi Metro, I guess) of govt’s infrastructure projects.

Graham Johnson
Melbourne, Australia