Railways need a track change

Focusing on premium services will have a knock-on effect

The steady deterioration of the railways has been taken for granted for so long that two indictments of their performance failed to set off red signals for lawmakers gathered for the monsoon session of Parliament. One is an internal assessment that predicts domestic airlines will overtake the railways as the preferred mode of travel for upper-class passengers. The other is a Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report on the railway catering service tabled in Parliament last week highlighting well-known issues of substandard quality, hygiene and outright malpractice. Both reports offer the government a good opportunity to significantly upgrade service standards, synchronising the efforts with the sensible suggestion from the Prime Minister’s Office earlier this year to reverse years of stasis with a “creeping increase” in fares.

The observation in the railways’ blueprint upturns traditional notions about the speed-price equation in passenger decisions. Thus, airlines were considered a preferred mode for distances over 1,000 km whereas the railways scored on short-haul routes. Now it appears that the railways’ short-distance monopoly has weakened: 25 per cent of domestic air travel today is within 500 km. The report sets out the surging advantage of aviation in stark terms. Airlines are close to transporting 100 million passengers a year and air traffic is growing 20 per cent annually. The railways’ premium segments – First AC, AC II, AC III and First Class – carry 145 million passengers, but in 2015-16 this traffic shrank 5 per cent. “It is essential that Indian Railways addresses the two key value propositions of [the] airlines passenger business — price and speed — immediately to sustain its core business in the passenger segment in the future,” the report observes. Achieving this involves urgently addressing such basics as hygiene and catering. 

Part of the problem is institutional. As the CAG report on catering services has pointed out, the declining quality of railway catering is principally because responsibility has ricocheted between the railways and the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation since 1999 with scant oversight or accountability for poor service (which is why the number of consumer complaints has not diminished). Meanwhile, the long-awaited programme to modernise stations via private management contracts has made a modest start with the Habibganj station in Bhopal now managed by a private player. The railways has shortlisted 28 stations for upgrade. It will be useful if the bulk of these are on the trunk routes that attract premium passengers. But this exercise also needs to accelerate, as the CAG observed in a June 2016 report. 

It is easy to understand why prosperous Indians increasingly prefer the world-class consumer-friendly ambience of air travel to the unedifying experience of travelling by the Indian Railways. Certainly, upgrading services for 22.2 million passengers a day over 7,216 stations, with one of the highest passenger densities in the world, will be a tough ask in the short run. But upgrading premium services will be a good starting point for a turnaround. Far from being an elitist approach, the experience of the Delhi Metro has demonstrated in a limited way that making transport services acceptable to high-income consumers has a knock-on benefit for all consumers.