TATA Steel Express - Second Sitting sasta bhi, sabse achha bhi - Ravi Raj

From Perumkolam Hariharan

As part of a study on the impact of Konkan Railway on Industrial Development, I was going through a detailed report on the Konkan Railway Project which came as a supplement with The Eco. Times, Madras dtd. 3rd. Octber, 1994. It then occured to me that there is an interesting issue which many of our railway fans / users might not have observed.
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The actual railway project alignment connecting Roha and Mangalore is 760 kms., whereas in the Time Table the distance is inflated, viz. 1060 kms from Roha to Mangalore.
Obviously, this enhanced distance is for the computation of the fare, viz., chargeable kms. Even years back, for Hill railways, the Railway used to maintain two types of distances, -- Actual distances and Chargeable distances. Even in the
Southern Railway Tme Table, of April, 1968 for the Mettupalaiyam-- Ootacamund section, both the distances are indicated in the timing section, Actual kms. 46 kms./ Chargeable kms. 118 kms. Apparently this practice has been discontinued for quite sometime now.
As a holder of the KRCL 10 year bonds in the '90s, I used to get a lot of updates from KRCL. Their stated objective was to reduce the distance from Bombay to Mangalore to 914 kms.
Because of project slippage and cost overruns, KRC obviously decided to keep a higher fare to generate higher revenues and eventually increase its Return On INvestment. (ROI). I think nobody would complain about this. But there could have been more transparency by indicating both the actual as well as chargeable kms.
Considering the strategic benefits of the project, users would only be happy to pay more for substantial tangible user benefits.
The problem is, this type of presentation would give an inflated average speed of the train which iis an illusion and quite misleading.
Even simple comparisons can bring out this factor. The Time Table indicates a distance of 81 kms from Mangalore Central to Udipi. The track virtually runs parallel to the National Highway. By road the distance from Mangalore to Udipi is about 64 kms!