Off The Rails: How Indian Railways Is Becoming Unaffordable & Inconvenient For The Common Man

In Marxist philosophy, 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat' refers to a condition where the working class grabs control over state power. The recent viral videos of ticketless travellers, or passengers with unreserved second-class tickets, storming into the air-conditioned coaches of trains, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi's favourite Vande Bharat trains, can easily be explained in terms of the phrase. Here is the proletariat taking revenge on the bourgeois state for replacing Passenger trains, referred to as 'ordinary' trains in railway jargon, with 'elite' Express trains in a bid to falsely prove that India is a developed country.

The phenomenon will continue till the railways come to terms with the reality and rationalise their operations. As I say at the beginning of my book 'Train Addiction: Travels Through India by Train', in October 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the railways suddenly announced that they would be replacing all non-air-conditioned Sleeper coaches with AC Economy coaches, whose fare would be higher than that of Sleeper Class, but lower than that of AC 3-Tier. The berth capacity in the AC Economy coaches would be 83, as opposed to 72 in the Sleeper class. This meant that passengers would be paying more to travel with less leg room between berths, even though the coaches were air-conditioned. Did that make sense?

Four years later, this announcement has unfortunately become a reality. As a result, if one sits at wayside stations to watch trains speed past (as I am fond of doing), one notices that three-fourths (or more) of an average 'superfast' train is made up of air-conditioned coaches, and only one-fourth (or less) of it of non-air-conditioned coaches; whereas till recently, it was the other way round. This is shocking, given that trains are the lifeline of the country, and are the common man's sole means of transportation.

Let us take the Pune-Mumbai sector as an example to see how high-handed and irrational the railways have become. At one time, there were two overnight Passenger trains between Mumbai (CSMT) and Pune, and a day-time Passenger train between Pune and Karjat, with dirt-cheap fares. These trains have been scrapped. The Pune-Karjat Passenger, especially, enabled the poor to travel to Karjat, and onwards to Mumbai in the Karjat-Mumbai local trains, for fares as low as ₹50 per passenger. Contrast this with the Pune-Mumbai AC Chair Car fare on the Vande Bharat Express, which is upwards of ₹700! What are we trying to prove? That India is Japan and Germany?

The Vande Bharat fare is a case in point, for one can travel in the same AC Chair Car class from Pune to Mumbai on the Deccan Queen for half the fare.

This obsession with air-conditioned coaches reaches ridiculous proportions if one thinks of the day-time Koyna Express that runs between Mumbai and Kolhapur via Pune, leaving Mumbai at 8:45am and pulling into Kolhapur exactly 12 hours later. The train runs with six different classes of accommodation: AC First Class, AC Two-Tier, AC Three-Tier, AC Chair Car, Sleeper Class, and Second Class Unreserved. In the past, sleeping coaches were never attached to daytime trains. When and why did this rule change? If all the sleeping coaches on the Koyna Express were replaced with Second Class unreserved coaches, wouldn't more passengers be accommodated on the train? Especially as, with the permanent cancellation of the Sahyadri Express, it is now one train less between Mumbai and Kolhapur?

Speaking of the cancellation of the Sahyadri Express, it was the only train that halted at Neral Junction, the base-station for the picturesque hill station of Matheran, on its way to Mumbai. Now, with the train gone, Punekars who wish to visit Matheran have no direct access to the hill station. The early-morning Sinhagad Express should have been given a two-minute halt at Neral, but the railways, in all their wisdom, haven't thought of doing this.

Again, the Pune-Bhusaval Express, the only train that connected Pune to Nashik, has been permanently suspended, god knows why.

As for the Pune-Lonavala local trains, the less said the better. The frequency of the locals has still not been restored to pre-Covid times. To make matters worse, most Pune-Lonavala locals now originate from, and terminate at, Shivajinagar, making it highly inconvenient for East Pune commuters. The local train services are often suspended on Sundays for technical reasons. Picnickers who thus wish to go to Lonavala to enjoy the monsoon rains and waterfalls have to abort their plans. True, there are buses that go all the way to Lonavala, but the fare on these buses is four times that of the local trains, and the buses take twice as long to reach.

Responding to criticism on social media, the railways have recently announced that they would add more Second-Class unreserved coaches to Express trains. But will they roll back their idea of replacing the ubiquitous 3-Tier Sleeper with AC Economy coaches? The average Indian train traveller does not need air-conditioning. He prefers the fresh natural breeze to blow over his face as he peregrinates from place to place. It is about time the railways come to realise this and call a spade a spade.

(The writer is a well-known author and former head of the English department at Savitribai Phule Pune University)