Putting to rest the public demand for suburban trains, particularly in Bengaluru, the Ministry of Railways has come out with a draft Suburban Rail System Policy...
(1) Good step which should have been taken long ago. (2) Suburban trains should be operated on large scale on the dedicated tracks. (3) Moving a step forward, IR must plan to have separate tracks for Suburban and long distance trains in Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai etc and form a JV with respective state govts. to operate the respective suburban trains. Major part of the taxes and economic benefits due to the daily commuters directly or indirectly go the respective state govt., it is duty of state govt and not IR to... more...
provide subsidised travel to these daily commuters in return. (4) Cheap Suburban travel is a subsidy given by IR to relatively rich residents of metro cities at the cost of general (rural/small town)populace of country which are relatively much poorer.
Why not!! Ahmedabad/ Nagpur has more population today as compared to Mumbai when the first suburban train was introduced in Mumbai several decades ago! But it has to be preceded by a proper study of traffic, routes and techno-economic analysis.
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