we saw incidents like stuffed AC coaches, death due to stampede in view of holiday season. In this backdrop, lets address the elephant in the room- rake standardisation and ACfication of railways.
My opinion is based on extensive reading of current state of economy and augmented by various newspaper articles.
That being said, rake standardisation is an ill thought strategy, especially when done without any homework.
--Why do I say so?
1. India provides free grains to 80cr people. These are people who cannot afford even something as basic as daily food and nutrition(mind you, this is almost 60-70% of India's population). These are the people that form the backbone of our labour market and contribute to labour arbitrage
2. Yearly incomes of bottom 50% people is barely Rs.50,000 per annum. An AC3 train ticket from Delhi to Patna for a single person would cost about 3% of his annual income or 30% of his monthly income.
(
click here--Manifestation of these observations are-
1. 95% of travelers are Non AC (see this article-
click here while AC coaches in trains are roughly 60-70% of the rake (
click here . Where do you expect these people to go if not crowd AC coaches?
2. Railways was recently forced to introduce trains like Vande Sadharan. You cant ignore this segment at all.
3. Rake standardisation of certain trains were reversed (eg LTT CBE Ex)
--In that case, why are AC seats going full?
India has seen a K shaped recovery post COVID. While richer became rich, poorer became poorer. All in all, a very limited no of middle class people saw upward migration, so much so that they could afford 3AC tickets. Even 1A and 2A has demand now. Rest just took it because of compulsion. This is corroborated by the fact that luxury housing and car segment saw a phenomenal growth, while affordable housing and 2 wheeler sales saw a downturn.
--Suggestions-
1. People complain about subsidies offered in operations of Sleeper coaches, not realising that even 2A and 1A are loss making ventures. Ideally, 2A and 1A coaches should have been swapped with 3A coaches while sleeper could have been hiked by a marginal amount. People going in 1A or 2A could have easily shifted to 3A or flights. Railways should have restricted 1A and 2A to premium trains. In this way, profitability could have been achieved.
click here2, Trains like 8 Car VB occupy slots during operations. Better to run a 22C Janshatabdi (or new high priority category) so that all segments of society can be catered instead of only privileged ones. Its not as if VBs are running at 140-150 in all sections. VBs are merely cosmetics in that section, and are punctual only bcoz of high priority accorded to them.
3. Bullet train profitability is highly debatable. There is no profitable High Speed train operations (baring one or two of them). 1L crore Rs could have done wonders to highly saturated routes like NDLS-CNB-MGS, NDLS-KOTA-RTM, NDLS-AGC-VGLJ-BPL, MMCT-BRC, MAS-HWH and so on and so forth). Air connectivity could have been augmented in both the cities instead (esp after Navi Mumbai Airport)
4. Standardise rakes in zones with relatively better socio economic conditions. 2SL, 14AC work better in sectors like MMCT-ADI and southern India. It wont work in NER, ECR etc. NER has been in standardisation spree lately.
--Future of rake standardisation and ACfication of railways-
Its likely that inequality will persist in future. Urbanisation rates are poised to increase from 30% in 2030 to 50% in 2050. Acc to Ravenstein's migration law, there will always be a source and a destination for migrants due to unequal development, irrespective of how much the source (for eg Bihar, UP) develops.
India will surely see a hike in percapita income with our consistent 6-7% growth, but its not yet adjusted for inflation. That being said, inequality is something that'll still persist. As of now, rake standardisation is not the most wise decision.
Comments are welcome, please be civil, no namecalling. Substantiate your argument with news articles and reports.
Good day.
