 | | PICTURE SPEAK | |  | | STEAMING AHEAD: Lalu has combined pragmatism with populism | | When Rajdhani Express first ran between Delhi and Howrah in 1969, it took 17 hours to cover the 1,451-km distance. Today, 36 years later, the train takes over 18 hours to complete the journey. Toofan Mail, the once prestigious train which had Bollywood songs written on it, covered the distance between Delhi and Howrah in 28 hours when it was started in 1928. Today it runs the same distance in 36 hours. The railways has a long list of trains that have seen their speed regress over the years. One apparent reason: new stoppages. The Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani had just one stop when it started running. Now it has five. Toofan Mail's 42 stops have over the years increased to 86. More stops, more time, right? Not necessarily, if you ask Lalu Prasad Yadav. Amidst the well deserved accolade that the railway minister has been showered with for the financial turnaround of India's biggest transport company, one significant aspect of his budget has gone under-noticed. It's the railways' new resolve to run faster and longer trains with higher occupancy. That the railways is even thinking on these lines represents a fundamental shift in the working of the 153-year-old organisation. And things have moved beyond the thinking stage. For the 550 crore passengers who travel by train every year, this is more relevant than financial revival. Here's a glimpse of what's in store. Between July 2006 and January 2007, the average speed of the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani Express trains will go up from 76 km to 81 km an hour, cutting travel time by two hours. The benefits of the cut in travel time will be bigger than what they may first appear to be. Right now, the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani leaves Delhi at 4 p.m.-an inconvenient time for office goers. If it departs at 6 p.m.-which is what is proposed-people can catch it after office and reach Mumbai before office hours, at 8.35 a.m. Rajdhanis aren't the only trains to be speeded up. The plan is to make 224 express trains super fast this year. Quite unlike what the name suggests, super fast train in India is any train with an average speed of 55 km an hour. So far, the Indian railways has only 400 such trains. | | COME, FLY INDIAN RAILWAYS | | Low-cost airlines, many thought, boded ill for the railways. Now, with aggressive pricing, Lalu Yadav is turning the battle on its head. We can't fight you on speed. You don't fight us on fares." That's Indian Railways' message-or warning-to low-cost airlines. A rather bold, though belated, one from India's number one transporter that carries over 550 crore passengers every year, or 1.5 crore people daily. However, it's not the number but the kind of passenger it gets that's railways' problem. The non-ac class, which accounts for nearly 88 per cent of passengers, remains loyal to the railways. But these are not the passengers that get railways the big bucks. Those come from ac class travellers. Till 2005-6, an ac-I ticket was 14 times and ac-II ticket seven times the price of a sleeper class ticket. Such prohibitive pricing has made wealthy passengers flee to airlines, which offer twin advantages-lower fares and much swifter journeys. The ac-I particularly had become what a railway official called the warrant holders' class, meaning most passengers travelled on free passes. Even then the occupancy of this class was barely 47 per cent. Railways is now trying to correct what it can: ac class fares have been cut by 10 to 30 per cent, depending on the distance. And more cuts have been promised in future. But even railways knows this isn't going to be enough. Its answer: Garib Rath-trains that will carry passengers in ac comfort at up to the current ac-III fare. That's without any subsidy or cross-subsidy. In fact, even such low fares will have up to 25 per cent profit margin. How? Garib Rath coaches will have a few extra berths and seats. In normal trains, the difference between the lowest and the highest fares is wide because higher classes cross subsidise lower-class fares. In Raths, every ticket will pay for itself and can thus operate without overcharging any class of travellers. The first Garib Rath is likely to roll out this summer. Railways hopes that it will become so popular that one day all trains in India become all-ac trains. | | | | | | | | If running trains faster will benefit passengers, it will be a bonanza for the railways. Faster trains actually means more trains. For instance, five trains are at present used to run the Delhi-Mumbai Rajdhani service-two trains in journey, two in yards at Delhi and Mumbai for checks and cleaning and a back-up train. Two trains are blocked in the yard because the difference between the arrival and departure time of the trains is less than eight hours. And eight hours is what it takes to go through all the checks and cleaning of Rajdhanis. Once the travel time is reduced by two hours, there will be more than eight hours between the arrival and departure time of the trains. This will eliminate the need to block two trains in the yard and free them up for use elsewhere by the railways. One obvious option is to add the coaches of the freed train to the running Rajdhanis and cut their perpetual waiting lists. This is how faster running trains will enable the railways to run lengthier trains, without having to buy any new coaches. Additional coaches will cut the wait list and increase the occupancy-a win-win for the railways and passengers. The railways right now has 86 trains which have 24 coaches. In 2006, it will make at least 90 more trains of 24-coach length. | | INTERVIEW | LALU PRASAD YADAV | | | "We are Operating in a fiercely competitive environment"  In an exclusive interview to India Today, the Union Railways Minister sounds like a CEO in the midst of turning around his company. Excerpts: Q. How has running Indian Railways been different from running Bihar? A. In my view, Indian Railways has immense untapped potential (Bharatiya rail sone ki chiriya hai). On the other hand Bihar suffers from many man-made and natural handicaps. The two situations are not comparable. Q. What were your key goals for Indian Railways when you were given charge of the ministry? A. The foremost task was to restore railways' financial health. This was to be done not merely by re-balancing tariff (a euphemism for raising low-class fares) but by increasing volumes, reducing unit cost and sharing the gains with customers. Another priority was to lay the foundation for modernisation of the Indian Railways and to make it No. 1 in the world. It is a matter of satisfaction that we have done reasonably well on all key priorities. Q. Railways has traditionally been the victim of political patronage (in contracts, deciding the stoppages for trains and in many other ways). How do you intend to overcome these? A. Our policy is to award all contracts through a process of open competitive bidding. This strategy has paid us rich dividends as evidenced by handsome growth rates in catering, parcels and advertisements. Q. What big improvements can you promise in the next two-three years? Key points of your vision beyond 2006-07? A. We have decided to celebrate 2006 as the year of "Serving the Passenger with a Smile". Over the next two years, passengers would feel the difference in quality of service, be it on stations or on trains. Q. Are you open to the idea of having an independent tariff commission or an eventual corporatisation of railways? A. We are operating in a fiercely competitive environment in all our business segments. We can no longer fix tariff arbitrarily. Our decision to reduce fares for ac First Class and ac Second Class is guided by market considerations. In any case, we are regulated by Parliament, the sovereign body of the people of India. | | Read between the lines and you will find that Lalu's budget proposals are full of such simple but significant changes. But how will the railways increase the speed of trains without cutting the number of stoppages? According to Sudhir Kumar, officer on special duty to Yadav, the answer lies in questioning and reviewing many small things that were taken for granted in the past. For instance, the best engine the railways had in the 1960s-when the Rajdhanis were introduced-was of 1,500 horse power. Today it has engines with 6,000 horse power. Superior engines, tracks and coaches make deceleration, acceleration and general running of trains faster and should compensate for the loss of time due to stoppages. In the past not much thought was given to making up for the lost time in stoppages. Every time a new halt was added, the time taken by the stoppage was simply added to the time table of the train. And since stoppages were added one by one over several years, the journey time just kept stretching. The railways timetable today is a tinkered version of what the British had devised in the 1860s. Lalu has promised an all-new timetable for all trains in which the time taken by each train will be reviewed. Speed restrictions are another major cause of slow running of trains. For instance, the 1,389-km Delhi-Mumbai route has 78 speed restrictions which together add 2 hours 45 minutes to the travel time. These restrictions on all routes are being reviewed and many will be removed in a time-bound schedule. Why couldn't all this happen before? The past approach of the railways was like the Indian industry's attitude to consumers till the early 1990s. In a sellers' market, most industries didn't pay attention to reducing their costs. Higher costs were passed on to the customer as higher prices. But faced with global competition, companies today make every attempt to absorb the cost. As a transporter, the railways behaved similarly till now. It extended the travel time of trains every time a new halt was added, instead of reviewing if the time taken in the halt could be absorbed. On the price front, fares were raised to accommodate the cost of operations. Faced with competition from better highways and low-cost airlines, Indian Railways is beginning to have the same kind of awakening that the Indian industry had 15 years ago. "We are operating in a fiercely competitive environment in all our business segments," admits Lalu (see interview). This year's budget is replete with initiatives that will impart long-term competitiveness to the railways in both the passenger and freight business. Some of these were first highlighted in india today in September 2005. On the passenger side, the new initiatives range from new and better trains, measures to make railway platforms cleaner, modern and more functional and a slew of other measures. "Indian Railways is responding to customer requirements. Not just on price but also in services," says Kumar. More importantly, instead of making ad hoc changes, the railway budget has announced three-four-year plans for most fare and freight reforms. Price and non-price sweeteners have been offered on freight carriage. In addition to reduction in peak rates and announcement of variable (seasonal) rates, flexibility in the size of wagons and points of loading and unloading of wagons has been offered for the first time. Customer response has been good: the freight earnings target has been more than met in both volume and value terms. Indian Railways believes that with its new customer-friendly face it can take on the low-cost airlines. But that isn't likely, not at least now. For long distance travel, airline fares are still close to ac fares, though Garib Rath could pose some challenge to airlines (see box). Air travel's biggest competitive advantage is time, which the railways can never match. Says Captain G.R. Gopinath, chairman, Air Deccan, which is credited with pioneering low-cost aviation in India: "A more competitive railways is welcome. It's no threat to our business potential." Perhaps with 550 crore annual customers, the railways need not yet get hyper about losing them to airlines. If it can serve them well, India's booming trade and increasingly mobile people will keep the railways on the fast track. -With inputs from Puja Mehra
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224 trains to be made super fast by July 1, by raising their average speed to 55 kmph or higher.
