A study conducted by the Sunday Times shows that India runs its vast network more tightly, efficiently and economically than Britain's numerous privately owned railway networks.

Although the study's findings are somewhat skewed by the fact that it looks only at India's express train routes, it is a shot in the arm for the much maligned Indian Railways. Today, India has the world's largest rail network carrying 13 million people -- equal to the entire population of some European countries -- up and down the country each day.

Critics of Indian Railways are wont to point out that apart from raising prices each year, little has been done to improve the network and rolling stock since the British left. Privatisation, they say is the only way out.

Britain would disagree. Privatisation, railway experts here agree, has made the British rail networksignificantly less efficient than it was a few years ago. The also concede that while Indian Railways' safety record may not be the best in the world, it does work. The Sunday Times study establishes that the Indian system works efficiently than the smaller and now privatised railway network in Britain, both in terms of cost of travel and punctuality.

The paper compared the performance record of the Jammu Tawi Express, which runs from Thiruvananthapuram to Jammu Tawi (2500 miles) with the long distance express trains between London and Glasgow (400 miles) and London and Penzance (300 miles). The trains are judged to be unpunctual if they are more than 10 minutes late. It found that the Jammu Tawi express had a 95 per cent punctuality rate as compared with 71.3 per cent for the Glasgow bound express and 83.5 per cent for the Penzance train. The cost of travel to Glasgow worked out to 17.4 pence per mile and to Penzance 17.7 pence per mile, while the journey across India was 0.5 pence permile.

According to the Sunday Times study, based on data from different railway companies, even standards to punctuality are set higher in India, where a train is officially unpunctual if it is 10 minutes late, while in Britain, sleepers must be more than 30 minutes late to be classified as such.

In the couple of years since British Rail was privatised by selling off different routes to separate companies, the efficiency figures have slumped drastically. On certain routes, like the Virgin-run London-Glasgow route, trains can be late by a several hours, and when they do arrive are too packed for all ticket holders to get a seat. Complaints about the various railway companies has soared 80 percent in the last three months.

Barry Doe, an independent transport consultant says that this is a direct ``consequence of cost-cutting by the rail companies to maximise their profit''.