In the Union Budget 2024-25 presented in Parliament on July 23, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi allocated Rs.2.652 trillion (lakh crore) towards capital expenditure in the Railways. The sum is a marginal increase of roughly 2 per cent over the revised estimate for 2023-24.
In what can be construed as the government’s neglect of the preferred mode of long-distance travel for the majority of India’s population, the word “railways” figured only once in the entire Budget speech that was delivered by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Even this reference was tangential and made when she spoke in general terms about the government’s focus on essential infrastructure.
Soon after the Budget was presented, Union Minister for Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw said at a press conference that a whopping Rs.1.08 trillion of the budgetary allocation would be used for enhancing safety measures for the national carrier.
This was expected in view of the fact that there have been several train accidents in the recent past. Between July 20 and July 21, three goods trains derailed in three separate accidents in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and West Bengal. On July 26, a fourth goods train derailed near Bhubaneshwar. There were no deaths reported from these derailments.
However, there were several casualties in the three accidents that took place since June 2023. On July 18, eight coaches of the Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express derailed in Gonda district in Uttar Pradesh killing at least four persons and injuring 20 others. On June 17, the Kanchenjunga Express collided with a freight train in northern West Bengal, killing 10 and injuring 43. One of the worst-ever railway accidents took place on June 2, 2023, when three trains collided in the Balasore district of Odisha killing 296 passengers and injuring more than 1,200.
The site of a train accident in Gonda district, Uttar Pradesh earlier this month. | Photo Credit: SAJJAD HUSSAIN
The government’s apparent failure to ensure passenger safety has been compounded by its flip-flop on ensuring comfortable and dignified travel for the working class, which comprises the largest section of passengers using the Indian Railways. Passengers from economically weaker sections regularly travel in dilapidated sleeper-class coaches with no air conditioning and filthy bathrooms. Images of passengers sleeping in the aisles or near the toilets, and many sitting or standing for long hours on long-distance hauls have been widely shared on social media.
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On the other hand, the Modi government has continuously patted itself on the back for the Vande Bharat superfast trains, in which upper- and middle-class passengers travel in air-conditioned comfort on reclining chairs between cities that are less than 800 kilometers apart or that take less than 10 hours to cover by ordinary trains.
Former officials of the Railway Board have constantly harped on the need to ensure dignified and comfortable rail travel for the masses. Experts who spoke to the writers stressed upon the need to provide air-conditioned travel to economy class passengers as well. The Railway Board had taken cognizance of this need in the past, as we shall see in the next section of this article. But, in his post-Budget conference on July 23, Vaishnaw reiterated his ministry’s decision to focus on non-air conditioned coaches because the demand for “general travel” is on the rise.
He said 10,000 additional non-air-conditioned coaches will be manufactured in addition to the 2,500 coaches that are already under production. He did not, however, clarify what he meant when he said that the demand for “general travel” is going up. Would this imply that many passengers would continue to travel in the same pitiable conditions in non-air-conditioned coaches as they do presently?
Flip-flop over phasing out non-air-conditioned coaches
The government’s policy flip-flop is most evident in the reversal of its own decision to do away completely with non-air-conditioned coaches.
In October 2020, it was announced that work had begun to phase out non-air-conditioned coaches from all mail and express trains. This decision was taken during the tenure of the former chairman of the Railway Board, Vinod Kumar Yadav. He told Frontline that a conscious decision was taken to switch over from sleeper to air-conditioned coaches given the need to increase the speed of travel as well as to ensure the comfort of passengers travelling economy class for long distances.
Said Yadav: “At speeds of 130 kmph or more, non-air-conditioned coaches create technical and other problems. It becomes extremely difficult for passengers to bear the wind pressure, dust and extreme heat, often over 45°C. Therefore, the idea was mooted to gradually phase out all non-air-conditioned coaches in all mail and express trains and replace those with air-conditioned coaches. It was decided to manufacture a new AC-3 economy coach. It was also decided to keep the fare of these coaches lower than those in existing three-tier air-conditioned coaches.”
He explained that the decision was taken in line with the plans of Indian Railways to increase the speed limits of approximately 1,900 mail and express trains to 130 kilometres per hour in the Golden Quadrilateral section, which connects the four largest metropolitan areas, by the end of 2023. It had also been planned that subsequently average speeds would be increased to 160 kmph by the end of 2025. Till date, trains on all main routes have begun plying at 130 kmph and work is underway to increase speeds to 160 kmph along the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata routes of the Golden Quadrilateral, added Yadav.
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The ministry’s decision to increase production of non-air conditioned coaches, as announced by Vaishnaw on July 23, is a complete U-turn from the Railway Board’s earlier decision to phase out those coaches completely. As compared to the 10,000 additional non-air-conditioned coaches that will be manufactured, the figures pertaining to the manufacture of the air-conditioned three-tier economy coaches are too low. In March 2024, the Railway Board set a target of 1,768 air-conditioned three-tier economy coaches for the financial year 2023-24. In April 2024, it revised this upwards with a target of 2,263 coaches. On June 27, the Board issued a letter to the three coach manufacturing factories to complete manufacturing 300 coaches within the financial year 2024-25.
Flip-flop over Amrit Bharat trains
In July 2023, exactly one month after the Balasore tragedy, the government made a U-turn from its decision to phase out non-air-conditioned coaches by announcing a superfast express service with non-air-conditioned sleeper class coaches under the name of Amrit Bharat.
These would connect cities more than 800 kms apart or needing more than 10 hours of travel time. The tickets were priced at rates that were 15-17 per cent higher than existing rates for sleeper and second-class travel. Since most of those killed in the Balasore train tragedy were long-distance travellers jampacked into coaches—many passengers who were killed were travelling ticketless—the introduction of this service was seen as a knee-jerk reaction by the government.
Initially named Vande Sadharan, the train service was later called Amrit Bharat and Modi flagged off the first Amrit Bharat train from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh on 30 December 2023. Two other Amrit Bharat trains run between Anand Vihar in Delhi and Darbhanga in Bihar; and between Malda in West Bengal and Bengaluru in Karnataka.
A standard Amrit Bharat rake was designed to have two coaches for the physically handicapped, 11 units of general sitting coaches, eight units of sleeper three-tier coaches, and one pantry car, as per a letter issued by the Railway Board to the coach production factories in Chennai (Tamil Nadu), Rae Bareli (Uttar Pradesh) and Kapurthala (Punjab).
The Indian Railways boast that the coaches of Amrit Bharat trains would have “upgraded coach interiors, foldable snack tables, mobile charging points, foldable bottle holders, improved luggage rack, radium illumination flooring strip and aesthetically pleasing and ergonomically designed seats and berths.” The refurbished interiors of the coaches have been shown in publicity videos shared on social media platforms. However, the total number of Amrit Bharat trains has not gone up above four, more than six months after the service was launched.
After Sitharaman presented the Budget, Vaishnaw announced that the Indian Railways would add 50 Amrit Bharat trains to its fleet in the financial year 2024-25, after completion of ongoing production work.
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In March 2024, the Railway Board approved the production of 1,230 coaches for Amrit Bharat trains, which included 660 units of three-tier sleeper coaches for 80 passengers, 440 units of general sitting coaches, and 130 coaches catering to the physically handicapped. In a revised plan, the Ministry of Railways cut down the number of sleeper three-tier coaches to 440 while increasing general sitting coaches to 605 and coaches for the physically handicapped to 136.
However, surprisingly, expenditure on expanding the Amrit Bharat train service was marked by its conspicuous absence from Sitharaman’s Budget speech of July 23.
Flip-flop over Vande Bharat
The Prime Minister flagged off the first Vande Bharat train in February 2019—between New Delhi and Varanasi (Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency)—just ahead of the general election that year. The government was, until then, yet to go big on its plans for starting Vande Bharat trains. In December 2023, Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said that India would have as many as 4,500 Vande Bharat trains by 2047. Notably, as many as 82 Vande Bharat trains had been made operational, as of March 31 2024, most of them flagged off by Modi.
Vande Bharat express crossing the Katpadi Junction on April 8 at MGR Chennai Central-Coimbatore. | Photo Credit: VENKATACHALAPATHY. C
Opposition political parties have not let go of the opportunity to allege that these flagging-off ceremonies amply illustrate Modi’s concern for the rich and the well-to-do sections of train passengers while ignoring the needs of those forced to travel by the economy class. Images of dilapidated general and sleeper category coaches have been juxtaposed against the swanky interiors of Vande Bharat regularly posted by the government’s PR handles in attempts to give credence to these allegations.
“Vande Bharat trains cater mainly to well-to-do passengers who can afford comfortable AC travel for short and medium inter-city distances. While the idea of increasing the number of Vande Bharat trains is in itself good, the government should also chalk out a proper policy framework to ensure dignified travel for the masses,” Sudhanshu Mani, former general manager, Integral Coach Factory, told Frontline.
Mani, considered one of the brains behind the Vande Bharat project, has gone on record in several media interviews stating that successive governments in New Delhi have made a mistake by not focusing on the travel needs of common people.
In the interim Budget presented in February 2024 ahead of the general election, Sitharaman announced an ambitious programme to upgrade 40,000 railway coaches to Vande Bharat standards, “to elevate the safety, convenience, and comfort of rail travel while also providing a boost to private sector railway manufacturers through new refurbishment contracts”.
However, the final Budget presented on July, 23 makes no mention of this programme.
Government obsessed with speed
Former Chief Commercial Manager (Passenger Services), North-East Railways, based in Gorakhpur, V.K. Jayaswal, told Frontline that the “discrimination” against lower-class passengers that started decades ago has accelerated under the Modi regime. According to him, in most trains with 18 to 22 bogies, only two or three are meant for ordinary passengers. “The emphasis is on speed, and we are blindly following the Chinese model,” he said.
The Modi government’s bullet train project is part of this obsession with speed. Described as a “vanity” project that will benefit only a small and affluent section of the population, it was undertaken by the government through a special purpose vehicle called National High Speed Rail Corporation Limited (NHSRCL) and the first train will connect Mumbai with Ahmedabad in Modi’s home State. The total estimated cost of the bullet train project was Rs.1.08 lakh crore, as the then Minister for Railways Piyush Goyal told Parliament in July 2019, of which an expenditure of Rs.3,226.80 crore had already been incurred. However, the final cost could be revised upwards to around Rs.1.60 lakh crore owing to the higher costs of land acquisition and the rise in prices of various raw materials like cement and steel. Vaishnaw has promised that the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train will begin its first short run from August 2026.
Man in charge
The lopsided priorities of the railway ministry, where no fixed policy apparently exists to ensure passenger comfort and dignity, is questioned every time there is an accident. The ministry, headed by bureaucrat-turned-businessman-turned-politician, Vaishnaw, faced widespread criticism after the June 17 accident in which two coaches of the Sealdah-Agartala Kanchenjunga Express derailed when a goods train rammed into it near Rangapani railway station in Darjeeling district.
Vaishnaw rode pillion on a motorbike, in the full glare of cameras, to reach the accident spot, which was called out by Opposition parties as an exercise in public relations.
Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on his way to visit the Kanchenjunga Express train accident site in Darjeeling on June 17, 2024. | Photo Credit: ANI
The other vanity project for which Vaishnaw recently faced brickbats was the Modi selfie booths in railway stations. In response to a query filed under the Right to Information Act, 2005, the ministry said in December 2023 that at least 20 “permanent” selfie booths carrying Modi’s life-size three-dimensional models were installed on platforms of the Central Zone of the Indian Railways at a cost of Rs.6.25 lakh each. Besides this, 32 “temporary” selfie booths were erected in the same zone at a cost of Rs.1.25 lakh each. A few weeks after this information was disclosed, the Railway Ministry abruptly transferred Shivraj Manaspure, the Chief Public Relations Officer of Central Zone.
Ayaskant Das and Paranjoy Guha Thakurta are independent journalists based in the National Capital Region.
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