Railway's freight business up as it faces rising costs and competition

The transport network needs reforms and upgrades to compete in logistics

Before the Indian Railways, caravans of pack bullocks carried goods to places like the Deccan, where "neither navigable rivers nor wheeled traffic could penetrate far into the interior". The caravans, managed by the semi-nomadic Banjara community, connected the country and ensured goods traffic between regions, says Tirthankar Roy in ‘The Economic History of India: 1857-2010.’ The book notes that until the Railways began its dominance, bulk commodities travelled on the Ganges and the Indus and coast-to-coast shipping was used too.

More recently, the Railways has made all-time high investments of more than a trillion rupees in the first