The Hindu Business Line : Can Railways sweat its assets better?

The Railways has the assets. Better deployed, they can increase the carrying capacity manifold, and the Railways can earn enough surpluses to plough money back into expanding its network to the 2,00,000 km that Railwaymen dream of, says K. Venugop al.

IS THE Government not investing enough in the rail network? Railwaymen are quite convinced that the treatment they have got is step-motherly. At the time of Independence, there was about 54,000 km of railway track; in the 58 years since then only another 9,000 route km of track have been added. The British connected ports and the hinterland in a manner that would help move agricultural produce and other goods for export, and raw material for domestic industry.

It was not designed as a network connecting all parts of the country. Linking all district headquarters today would need more than 2,00,000 km of rail track, thrice today's length. Getting that done requires considerable investment — at Rs 1 crore a km that will be almost Rs 150,000 crore — and even the ardent Railway votary will concede that most of these routes will not immediately generate enough traffic, either passenger or goods, to be profitable.

But, then, they are quick with the rhetoric: "Why is the Government asking us to assure an 11 per cent return on the investment before it agrees to any investment in a railway project," asks a union leader. "Do they ask this question before committing money for road projects?"

It is a sore point that while the Government has allocated over Rs 54,000 crore (at 1999 prices) to upgrade the Golden Quadrilateral on the National Highways, it has earmarked barely a quarter of that sum for the Railways.

Of the Rs 7,230-crore budgetary support to the Railways for 2005-06, more than half will be returned to the Exchequer as dividend on capital invested, leaving very little for the Railways to invest in new lines. And, furthermore, they point out that the ambitious uni-gauge programme of converting all metre gauge track into broad gauge is invidious for it adds no new routes to the network; at best it only marginally enhances the carrying capacity of existing track.

Clearly, the Railwaymen are chafing. Despite being a monopoly on the track, the organisation has been steadily losing its share of the transportation market.

From holding 63 per cent of the freight market and 80 per cent of the passenger movement in 1950, it has just 43 per cent and 20 per cent respectively now. It was once the largest commercial organisation, big enough to have a separate Budget presented to Parliament. No longer.

Ten years ago the telecom industry and the Railways toted up a similar turnover. Today, the Railways has grown to about Rs 45,000 crore, the telecom sector, unbundled and opened to competition, has spurted to Rs 70,000 crore. The giant has been left far behind, its influence in society much diminished.

For the Railways workforce of 15 lakh, this is time to think hard about the future. The Railways continues on paper at least to be a monopoly. Yet, it must be increasingly aware of the fact that its customers, be they passengers or shippers, have viable alternatives cropping up all the time. In recent years, upper class rail travellers on many long-distance routes have been overjoyed to find air travel often cheaper.

Petroleum companies have set up pipelines to carry products instead of sending them in rail wagons. The last straw, it appears, is the investment in the National Highways that makes transporting goods by road faster.

The Railways is seeking more investment in its fleet and rail network to regain the lost market share. It still has an enormous number of customers whom it cannot service; the waiting list for berths on most trains is a long-standing feature of the organisation.

Trains are fully booked several days ahead of the journey, and yet there appears to be no spare capacity to deploy another train on the route.

Are there really no equipment to expand services or is that they are hidden in inefficiency? It is instructive to examine whether the Railways is working its enormous assets fully. The accompanying table provides a glimpse into the scale of the assets and how these are employed in comparison with those in China. The difference in productivity between the two countries is stark.

Coaches and locos earn money only when they move, not when they are stalled at stations. This is obvious because fares and freight are structured primarily on the basis of distance moved. When coaches move just 500 km a day (an average speed of 20-25 kmph) their capacity to earn is just a fraction of their potential. As freight wagons run even slower, their earning power is even poorer.

Increasing average speeds is not a matter of driving them at higher speeds with the consequent demands on the quality of track and its maintenance.

It may be simply a matter of configuring trains better, so that trailing loads are optimal for the locomotive; of using better signalling systems so that trains do not have to stop and start for the line ahead to clear; of reducing the number of halts for inter-city trains; and of reducing the time taken to turn around wagons and coaches or to undertake the periodic maintenance work on them.

It is not uncommon for a Howrah-Chennai train to arrive in the morning and idle in the yard till the evening for its return trip. Or, for a train from Chennai to Hyderabad to halt at 20 stations en route through the night and extend to an uncomfortable 14 hours an inter-city journey that could easily have been done under 11 hours.

The extra three hours means the 1,200 passengers aboard waste a collective 3,600 man-hours; the Railways wastes energy lighting or cooling the coaches for those three hours, not to count the fuel wasted in coaxing into motion a 1,200-tonne rake after each halt. Railwaymen will argue that the most halts are set by political demands, not by commercial logic.

That may be true, but the answer to the politician's request is a passenger train with few coaches that can efficiently nip in and out of stations that serve small towns.

It is also another long-established practice that tracks are reserved for a part of the day for the lumbering freight trains. It may be logical to separate these from the passenger trains that run faster and cannot labour behind them.

But closing the tracks to passenger trains for even a part of the day restricts the frequency of services that can be offered between two towns. And on the other hand, the quota system means freight trains have to wait several hours each day at wayside stations for their window of opportunity to open. This arrangement is sub-optimal for both passengers and freight.

A way out is to raise the speed of freight trains to that of passenger, if need be by reducing the number of wagons each locomotive is called upon to haul.

When the two species of trains are equal in speed they can be run one after another. Passengers will get better schedules, and freight can reach its destination faster and make the rail more attractive to shippers.

This may call for an upgraded signalling and communications network that would ensure trains run as swiftly and safely as the market demands. Given the country's growing prowess in software and telecom, it should not be difficult for the Railways to design and implement that. When aircraft can fly 30 seconds apart guided by controllers on the ground, why should there be sections of track where no more than six trains can run in an hour?

It cannot be beyond the Railways to equip all its locomotives with the communications capability to coordinate with one another wirelessly so that throughput is enhanced.

The assets are there. Better deployed they can increase the carrying capacity manifold, and the Railways can earn enough surpluses to plough money back into expanding its network to the 2,00,000 km Railwaymen dream of.