Indian Railways (IR) must learn that there are important issues to be addressed, not the least of them being rail safety and security. The image of a major train being held to ransom by a bow and arrow-wielding crowd is fresh in everyone’s mind. There are other concerns which cry out for attention. Rail Bhavan needs a mantri who can spend more time in the office, remain focused on important rail-related matters and, in fact, function almost like a chief executive.

While IR has hurtled along, sometimes with some success, a prolonged drought of proper leadership has sapped its vitality and wasted its potential. Far from functioning as a bulwark of the country’s transport infrastructure, it is nowhere even in the reckoning even regionally for technology, productivity and connectivity. Chinese Railways (CR) lagged IR as recently as a quarter-century; but it has surged far in network expansion, freight and passenger output, high-speed passenger services and heavy-haul freight corridors, enviable productivity levels and state-of-the-art technologies. IR, in comparison, remains content and smug with peripherals — flagging off “only ladies” or “Duronto” trains, Izzat passes and Yuva travels.

Every Railways minister is obsessed by new passenger trains. Not that passenger traffic per se is a bad bargain for railways: of the US$ 313 billion rail transport market, 57 per cent was passenger, and 43 per cent freight in 2005. But Duronto-style initiatives only exacerbate capacity constraints on the already clogged inter-megacity rail corridors and strain the availability of coaches as well as terminal and maintenance facilities.

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