Should railways revise approach towards general, sleeper class travellers?

On the evening of November 10 last year, two days before Diwali, the busy Ring Road next to Delhi’s Kashmere Gate Inter-state Bus Terminus was at a near-standstill. Scores of people were trying to board some half a dozen buses, and the queues spilled over onto the road.

Rakesh, a daily-wage worker from Delhi’s Shakurbasti area, was in the crowd, scampering for a seat on a bus that would take him to his hometown in Uttar Pradesh. He caught his breath to say: “I wanted to take the train. But we just came here from the railway station; it is impossible to get on a train.”
 

The missing seats in the general classes in the railways is a rarely discussed casualty of Covid-19. When the pandemic hit India, the nationwide lockdown and social distancing hobbled the railways. The worst hit was the general class: Nearly 90 per cent of its passenger volumes vanished. As the pandemic returned, normalcy returned, but more to the premium classes.
 

Around Diwali, around the time Rakesh was scampering for a bus, a person died in a stampede at the Surat railway station in a crowd of migrant workers looking to go home for the Chhath Puja — the vital Sun-worship festival in UP and Bihar. This came at a time, civil society leaders pointed out, when the government appeared to be focusing more on premium travel, including Vande Bharat trains.
 

Peaks and troughs
 

According to estimated figures based on the FY24 Budget, passenger travel in the general and second classes, which account for a bulk of mass transit, is lower than it was in 2008-09. Second class travel has likely fallen by 25 per cent since the last pre-pandemic year of 2018-19. Premium air-conditioned classes have largely remained at the pre-Covid levels and, in some cases, increased.
 

According to Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the national transporter ferried 6.5 billion passengers in 2022-23, and was slated to handle up to 7.5 billion in the current financial year.
 

Some have argued that the Indian Railways simply does not have the space to meet the demand. However, data shows the national transporter in FY23 was nowhere close to its highest passenger volumes, 8.43 billion, recorded in 2018-19. Experts say passenger demand has almost returned to pre-Covid levels, but the lower numbers are partly attributable to insufficient supply of coaches and trains for general class.
 

The Ministry of Railways is in consultation with the finance ministry and the NITI Aayog to introduce a solution for its mass transit woes, a top government official says. The railways’ decision to reduce general and sleeper coaches on some routes, he says, had more to do with technical restrictions, as it planned to increase the maximum and average speed of passenger trains.

“It is not feasible to have sleeper and general coaches in superfast trains running beyond 130 km an hour, as the pressure from the wind and dust in these coaches (with open windows) may pose a concern,” he says. In 2020, the railways decided to phase out non-AC coaches on trains running at more than 130 kmph.

Former additional member at the Railway Board, Vijay Dutt, says the problem is not necessarily one of coaches, but of capacity. “If the railway track network can be expanded to 100,000 km, the problem will be tackled to a large extent,” he says. Today, the railways are 67,000 km and roads 6.3 million km.

However, a former general manager with the railways says that with 95 per cent routes not allowed to go beyond 110 kmph, this rationale does not explain the falling numbers in general and sleeper passenger travel.

 

According to revised estimates for 2022-23 (presented in February last year), roughly 1.5 billion general and second-class passengers are likely to have travelled in mail and express trains in the previous financial year, which is almost 2.5 times its volumes in 2021-22. The national transporter expected this number to go up to 1.7 billion in the present financial year.
 

According to data shared by the railways, 3.7 billion passengers travelled in sleeper and general coaches (across express and regular trains) in the first seven months of FY24, which represents over 95 per cent of the railways’ total passenger volumes.
 

Slowing down
 

The railway ministry has said it is running more trains than the pre-Covid levels. In FY24, 562 more trains were run daily than the pre-Covid period, of which 354 were long-distance mail and express trains. This, however, is against an estimated increase of nearly 800 million second class passengers in FY24, according to the railways’ own budget estimates.
 

The situation has also given rise to a surge in ticketless travelling in trains. As of November, ticketless travelling in the third AC coaches of non-suburban trains more than trebled year-on-year in 2023-24, with 941,000 passengers travelling without bookings. Similarly, ticketless travel in sleeper coaches nearly doubled to 7 million passengers.
 

The first and second AC coaches, which typically remain partly protected from ticketless travellers, also saw multifold spikes in ticketless travelling (see chart). This data was provided on Rail Drishti, an open data portal of the Indian Railways launched by then Railway Minister Piyush Goyal in 2019. However, this, along with other railway-related data has been removed from the public domain now.

A look at coach production plans for the current financial year, with its mul­ti­ple revisions highlighted in an earlier media report, shows that the railways may have been caught off-guard in its estimation of passenger volumes.

In the coach production plans for FY24 made in July 2022, 162 general or Deen Dayalu coaches were first sanctioned. These were eventually revised to 254 in April 2023, and later increased to 438 in a third revision in May 2023.
 

Similarly, sleeper coaches, which had been allocated only 138 units in April 2022, were revised up to 704 coaches by May 2023.

According to Lalit Chandra Trivedi, former general manager of East Central Railway, running more Deen Dayalu, Antyodaya, and Jan Sadharan trains should be on the Centre’s agenda. “These are trains with only second class coaches, and one such train can relieve the railways of the pressure of at least 2,000 passengers,” he says.

The railways plans to launch a number of fully non-air conditioned ‘push-pull’ trains, which work via two locomotives, one at the front and the other at the back, making movement easier.

Capacity expansion

“The January to March quarter sees a lot of projects commissioned, and mobility on the network gets impacted adversely,” the railway minister told Business Standard in February last year.

This is the reason why the Centre kept modest revenue goals for the railways despite the sizeable investment. The Budget estimates for FY24 were largely in line with the revised estimates of FY23,as the focus would be on expansion and renewal works.

The railways has been allotted close to Rs 13 trillion over the past decade to modernise and expand its infrastructure. An analysis of the capital expenditure trends over the past five years shows that while money from the Centre has been aplenty, it was the execution which had been an issue. With the railways front-loading its capex plans, this is now showing improvement. For example, the railways in FY22 used 77 per cent of its revised Budget allocations for construction of new railway tracks, compared to 36 per cent in FY18.

Officials with the railways say most of the expansion works will bear fruit by FY25. Till then, it has to strike a balance between its commercially profitable freight business and the loss-making passenger business. Climate consciousness will play a role.

“Industries will have to make the shift to the railways to meet their own carbon emission goals,” says a sector expert.

That could help bring things back on track.