# India's trains: End of the line for national service?



## caravanman (Apr 8, 2015)

This item from the BBC, about potential modernisation and privatisation following the British model...

(Not a great success as far as I am concerned!)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-32200190

Ed.


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## jis (Apr 8, 2015)

Basically, the government does not have enough money to be able to build what needs to be built and run what needs to be run. This appears to be a last ditch attempt to get more resources engaged in the railways as far as I can tell.

Of course after the Congress Party imploded during the last election with no recovery in sight and a relatively right wing Hindu chauvinist BJP trying to tack a bit to the center firmly in control with absolute majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Parliament ) this sort of thing as in accelerated disinvestment is to be expected. Just as much as banning of beef is sort of expected in many parts of India.

Says he sitting in India looking aghast at some of things that appear to be happening!


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## cirdan (Apr 9, 2015)

Sorry if this is off topic, but I was surprised to read that Indian railways carry 23 million passengers a day. I wonder how many of those are short-haul commuters versus LD travellers.

From the article, it doesn't seem to me that this is an attempt to privatize the railroad but rather to allow more competition and private sector initiative, and a separation of infrastructure and operations is necessary to enable this. I think especially in freight the private sector can do better than governments. The growth in freight by rail in Europe is a clear indicator of this.


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## xyzzy (Apr 9, 2015)

Meanwhile the domestic airline industry (IndiGo, Jet, SpiceJet, etc) is growing rapidly. Oil prices are helping them.


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## caravanman (Apr 9, 2015)

Indian railways have a paternalistic approach to employees, and provide subsidised housing, medical, education, etc, etc.

As someone who likes the idea of employers giving full care to their workers, this appeals to me.

India is a very poor country, and whilst the "middle classes" are growing, many millions of citizens require transport at very cheap rates.

Noone will "invest" if they can't make money... who will benefeit, not the millions of poor?

Breaking things up into smaller bite size chunks may facilitate a sell off.

Air India and Jet airlines are not making money inside India, yesterdays "upgrading" of their safety rating on routes to USA will allow them to increase their flight frequency and so offset some losses.

Jish, if you are in India, keep away from the red sandalwood areas.... 

ed


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## Anderson (Apr 9, 2015)

On the one hand I suspect there's going to be a far more complicated picture in India than in the UK (if only because of the size and nature of the country). On the other hand, this doesn't strike me as an all bad thing. The UK situation might not have played out perfectly but I wouldn't exactly call it a failure...ridership has doubled (roughly) over the last 20 years and has likely (over the last three years) passed the WWI-era peak levels. Granted, the travel patterns are different and the population of the UK is bigger now than it was then, and granted there are some generational patterns at play with respect to timing, but I'm hard-pressed to call privatization a flop in the UK.

India may, of course, be a different animal...at a bare minimum I would expect to see a much broader system of concession travel there versus in Britain.


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## caravanman (Apr 9, 2015)

Certainly the picture in India is much different to the UK...

My problem with "privatisation" is that public assets are sold off into private ownership...

Here in the UK, we had a national train service, which even included Sealink ships at one time. Nowadays, it is hard to get any "joined up" travel information. We have cheap tickets for some specific trains, but if the train you are connecting to is run by a different company, and you miss the connection, you are on your own... no refunds, nobody knows nothing, to coin a phrase!

How nice it was when we had an integrated service, run for the public benefit, not for profit...

Ed


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## Devil's Advocate (Apr 9, 2015)

Anderson said:


> On the one hand I suspect there's going to be a far more complicated picture in India than in the UK (if only because of the size and nature of the country). On the other hand, this doesn't strike me as an all bad thing. The UK situation might not have played out perfectly but I wouldn't exactly call it a failure...ridership has doubled (roughly) over the last 20 years and has likely (over the last three years) passed the WWI-era peak levels. Granted, the travel patterns are different and the population of the UK is bigger now than it was then, and granted there are some generational patterns at play with respect to timing, but I'm hard-pressed to call privatization a flop in the UK. India may, of course, be a different animal...at a bare minimum I would expect to see a much broader system of concession travel there versus in Britain.


If you underfund the national network, remove or abandon a majority of rail lines, sell off the remaining cherry-picked assets at a discount, and then boast about improving numbers, well it's hard to see that as a legitimate comparison. In many ways the UK's rail renaissance is uniquely influenced by being in close proximity to several pro-rail countries with large numbers of pro-rail citizens. In much of the world privatization of rail infrastructure has resulted in perpetual reductions in passenger services and amenities, up to and including total abandonment as happened just south of here in Mexico.


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## jis (Apr 9, 2015)

I don't think that extreme will come to pass in India since the government will fall much before that comes to pass. Just speculation on my part seeing the level of influence wielded by the electorate when their railways is mucked around with. In my experience in general the Indian electorate has proved to be more savvy than the one in the US and definitely know which side of their toast is buttered much better than the U.S. one.


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## Anderson (Apr 10, 2015)

jis said:


> I don't think that extreme will come to pass in India since the government will fall much before that comes to pass. Just speculation on my part seeing the level of influence wielded by the electorate when their railways is mucked around with. In my experience in general the Indian electorate has proved to be more savvy than the one in the US and definitely know which side of their toast is buttered much better than the U.S. one.


I think it's also fair to point out how extreme the situation in Mexico was in many respects, too. Mexico only lost passenger service after many decades of failing to keep up service (they were still running pre-WWII heavyweight cars into the 1990s from what I can tell, some pics make it look like there were ex-Twentieth Century Limited cars running in Copper Canyon in the same era, and a lot of their stuff wasn't kept up too well). Looking at the state of things in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it doesn't seem that the loss of passenger trains there was a dramatic collapse so much as it was the culmination of a long period of mismanagement. I'm also seriously not sure how much of Mexico's system had survived into the 1990s (I know there was quite a bit left in the 80s from what Jim has said, but the pics I've seen from the early-to-mid 90s generally look pretty pathetic by comparison).

At the other end, there's one thing protecting train service in India and it's the same thing doing so in China: If you tried to axe passenger service on the rails, the airline network would completely crash from the load. In China, IIRC a good part of the reason for all the investment in bullet trains has been a desperate scramble to reduce demand on the airline industry.


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## neroden (Apr 12, 2015)

jis said:


> Basically, the government does not have enough money to be able to build what needs to be built and run what needs to be run. This appears to be a last ditch attempt to get more resources engaged in the railways as far as I can tell.
> 
> Of course after the Congress Party imploded during the last election with no recovery in sight and a relatively right wing Hindu chauvinist BJP trying to tack a bit to the center firmly in control with absolute majority in the Lok Sabha (the lower house of the Parliament ) this sort of thing as in accelerated disinvestment is to be expected. Just as much as banning of beef is sort of expected in many parts of India.
> 
> Says he sitting in India looking aghast at some of things that appear to be happening!


This seems odd to me. Religious chauvinist parties, like fascist parties, generally are PRO-investment in infrastructure, at least once they get into power. Our Republican Party is an outlier because it's run by "smash-and-grab" corporate looter types, not by religious types. The religious types usually like to build giant monuments to their own ego, and rail lines are a great example of that.


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## jis (Apr 12, 2015)

They are extremely pro investment as long it is not under government control, or something like that. Their election platform explicitly called for government divestment, and they are following through to some extent. However I don't see any threat to the passenger rail system overall in all this.


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## Anderson (Apr 15, 2015)

My understanding is that the BJP (the party in question here) is fairly pro-market. It is an aberration in some respects among "religious" parties, but I think that has quite a bit to do with the fact that Congress (the party, not the institution) was quite socialist and considering that they flopped pretty spectacularly in the last election there seems to be a clear mandate to do a lot of "pro-market" stuff.


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## caravanman (Apr 16, 2015)

It seems to me that the election of the BJP, backed by big business and wealthy media interests, makes for an ideal time to "sell-off", "privatise", or otherwise "create" opportunities for private investors to get their hands on public assets?

I am hopefull that the Indian railways won't change too much, anyway.

You Americans are lucky now, you can apply for a "visa on arrival" to India... Us Brits have to visit a visa office in person to apply...

Dunno why, it is the opposite of tourist friendly and makes holes in India's high tech I.T. claims . (Probably getting their own back on us for the colonial years!)

Never mind, I will be in the queue with my passport later in the year!

Ed.


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## jis (Apr 16, 2015)

caravanman said:


> It seems to me that the election of the BJP, backed by big business and wealthy media interests, makes for an ideal time to "sell-off", "privatise", or otherwise "create" opportunities for private investors to get their hands on public assets?
> 
> I am hopefull that the Indian railways won't change too much, anyway.
> 
> ...


Ed, UK just got visa on arrival effective June 2015. So afterall, you may be able to forgo the queue at the Indian High Commission.

Actually, even before BJP, Congress had become quite business friendly and were ready to do a lot of things that BJP can finally do. The problem faced by Congress was that they were in a coalition with left leaning parties which kept blocking most attempts to divest. In spite of that they managed to divest in the energy and steel sector to some extent. The difference now is that BJP does have the votes in the lower house (Lok Sabha), though they will still struggle to get things through the upper house (Rajya Sabha). BTW BJP's power base is primarily small to medium size businesses. Both BJP and Congress are very well connected when it comes to big business.

And, no, rest assured that no one is going to even vaguely propose dismantling the Railway Ministry or the Railway Board, or even the basic Zonal structure and the core financial structure involving the railways paying a dividend to the national exchequer in exchange for all sorts of monopoly powers. There will always be central control of all services that are contracted out. The situation in India is not even vaguely similar to anything that happens anywhere in North America or South America for that matter. Also, trying to analyze India using other countries as an example IMHO is a fool's errand. You have to get some first hand knowledge of India first. It is a very complex country, nation and civilization.

BTW, there is already one huge case where a new railway line was built by a separate corporation and Indian Railways buys access to the line to run its trains on it. The case is that of Konkan Railway.


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## caravanman (Apr 16, 2015)

Good news about the visa, Jis, where did you find that info? I can't see it anywhere yet?

This is the current situation: expensive and silly! :http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/asia/india/11426221/New-Indian-visa-rules-require-British-tourists-to-provide-fingerprints.html

I did ride the Konkan, knowing it was a new line, but unaware of the financing of it.

I had to smile a few years back, the shopkeepers called a bandh, strike, to protest about the potential opening up of India to foreign supermarket chains... The TV showed very fat shopkeepers parading and shouting, watched by their much thinner customers!

Ed


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## jis (Apr 16, 2015)

I saw a report in the Times of India yesterday. I believe the Wiki page on Indian Visa has been duly updated with the info about which countries are going to be added in June and also which entry/exit point airports are going to be added to the original list too. Airports like Ahmadabad will become eligible too.

Yeah opening up retail is a big issue with BJP's core business constituents  They don't want to be challenged by outsiders in their turf.

But it was the issue of emergency staple food warehousing and release through a rationed system during food shortages, instead of leaving it to the free market, where India put its foot down and refused to sign onto the latest round of WTO deal that almost made the whole thing fall apart until they wangled out an exception to address the legitimate concerns.

BTW, BJP has promised to bring full free convertibility of the INR within the next two years.


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## cirdan (Apr 16, 2015)

Anderson said:


> My understanding is that the BJP (the party in question here) is fairly pro-market. It is an aberration in some respects among "religious" parties, but I think that has quite a bit to do with the fact that Congress (the party, not the institution) was quite socialist and considering that they flopped pretty spectacularly in the last election there seems to be a clear mandate to do a lot of "pro-market" stuff.


I don't know much about the BJP but I have an Indian co-worker who defends them quite a bit. I don't know how objective he is but from what he says they actually sound quite reasonable. I don't know why the media love to paint them as out-of-control fascists, when in reality they're probably just progressive conservatives with religious roots.


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## jis (Apr 16, 2015)

I don't believe BJP is anything even remotely close to fascist. Incidentally, in India the term "fascist" is thrown about rather cavalierly by the left, just as cavalierly as the term "communist" or "socialist" is thrown about by the right, so either of those need to be taken with a pinch of salt. The BJP are Hindu religious chauvinists, at least until they formally sever ties with the RSS (let's destroys all mosques and build temples atop them) and the VHP (Let us reconvert all Muslims and Christians back into Hindus). Consequently after the election of BJP, attacks on Christians have risen dramatically, and this is something that they need to get under control ASAP.


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