A Welcome Relief After 163 Years

There are far too many things we take for granted. One of them happens to be the ubiquitous trains that criss cross our country of continental dimensions. We all expect them to come on time and be stench free (nothing wrong in that) and while waiting at level crossings wonder why they take so much time to come. As it trundles past little do we wonder about the people who actually make it run and the challenges they face.

Among the 'running staff' it is the Train Ticket Examiner (TTE) who is the most familiar to us as we gingerly produce our tickets when he comes calling. Once he gives his satisfactory nod and returns the ticket and does some marking on his clipboard, we breathe easy. If the ticket is RAC or waiting list we are quite literally at his mercy and treat him like mai baap, and some are more than willing to play that role.

The next in line is the guard. A very shadowy figure confined to the rear end of the train, waving red and green flags. Very little is known about their other functions.

However the most elusive among the lot is the train driver, who nowadays has acquired a more gentrified nomenclature - locomotive pilot. We may catch a fleeting glimpse of them when the train arrives at the station or chugs past a level crossing. Since they are rarely seen, it is out of sight out of mind for most of us.

We happily retire on our allotted train berths during night after setting snooze alarm on our smartphones, with no thought of how the engine driver keeps awake till dawn, or how he manages to spot dimly lit signals during rains or foggy weather.

But what I read the other day came as a rude eye opener. These drivers cannot respond to nature's calls or have refreshments during their 12-hour shift! Just for a moment I thought of how I would cope with such a pre-condition for my eight-hour shift - both my bladder and tummy did not take it kindly! The railways have been operational in the country for 163 years and it is hard to believe that so far lakhs of engine drivers, spanning 3-4 generations, have worked all their lives under such conditions.

Only recently the Railways introduced its first locomotive fitted with a bio-toilet. The doors of the toilet would open only when the speed of the train reaches zero. The locomotive pilots won’t be able to answer nature’s call while the train is moving. And whenever the pilot would go inside the toilet, the brakes of the engine won’t be released by any system. Hope more and more such locomotives are put to use to make the drivers' lives easier.

I shudder to think how horrid their working conditions might have been while they were driving the now defunct coal fired steam engines.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Train of Hope

A heartwarming story of a train stopping at a nondescript railway station in Japan just to help a girl passenger reach her school has become a social media sensation. The train stops at Kami-Shirataki railway station located near the girl’s house once in morning and in evening to help her commute to school. She is the lone passenger from that station to commute in that train.

It is reported that the train will not stop at the station, located in hinterlands of the Hokkaido island, after March, once she finishes her schooling. But there are some skeptics who have dismissed it as a PR gimmick and pointed out that the plan to take off stoppage at Kami-Shirataki has more to do with the ending of fiscal year in March, than the girl’s academic year.

However, the very fact that a government could ensure that a train stops at a station just to provide last mile connectivity to a student, is something that sounds too good to be true in these parts, where mai baap syndrome reigns supreme and railway ministries always took the cake. Raiilway ministers, irrespective of the government in power, have always been ardent practitioners of this art, with the order of priority being self interest followed by electoral arithmetic.

Railway budgets have always been used as a platform to dole out new trains, railway lines to keep their own constituency or the state in good humour, with little regard to feasibility, overall health of the railways or needs and aspirations of people residing in other parts of the country. Moreover sundry MPs and MLAs too have wielded the levers of power to introduce new train stops or divert the route mainly to fulfil their own pet agendas. 

A very glaring perversion of the above Japanese story happened in the early nineties in our country, when Jaffer Sharief was the Railway Minister. He introduced Lalbagh Express from Bangalore to Chennai with just one stop at Katpadi. The train timings were such that it helped a student commute daily from Bangalore to Christian Medical College at Vellore near Katpadi. And that student happened to be none other than the minister's own daughter!

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

IRCTC: We don't need no reservation ...

I vaguely remember a Reader's Digest joke in pre-IRCTC days, which was as follows: A foreigner goes to a railway reservation counter in India and said, "Excuse me if it is possible" ... Before he could finish the sentence the clerk interrupted, "In this world everything is possible". But when the foreigner asked for a ticket for a particular destination and date he said, "Oh on that date it is not possible."

A good number of train travellers may now be shunning the queues before railway booking counters, but their interface with IRCTC site no way makes their lives easier. The moment we log on to www.irctc.co.in the only icon that gets going is that of buffering with a message 'Connecting...'. During peak hours, especially when the Tatkal guys are hogging the bandwidth, it acts like the cyber world equivalent of Chinese torture.

The speed with which the IRCTC site loads makes me wonder whether the data packets are being transferred using Railway Parcel Service! Getting the 'plan my travel' page to load is not for the faint hearted. You should count yourself lucky if you attain your Abracadabra or khul-ja-sim-sim moment at 16th or 17th attempt.

But then it is not even half the battle. You need a nimble set of fingers to type in the station codes and passenger names. If the number of vacant seats is above hundred you stand some chance, otherwise its as likely as India winning world cup football.

After making the bookings the path through payment gateway to your bank account or credit card authentication is fraught with all kinds of dangers and you have to wait with baited breath and a prayer on your lips. Minefields such as 'service unavailable' and 'you have timed out' lie in wait to strike at the most unsuspecting and crucial moments.

Once you clear the payment getaway, take a hard look at the booked berths, whether they match with the preferences you had mentioned while booking. IRCTC often reserves its most lethal googlies at this step. If you have booked a berth for a senior citizen with lower berth as preference, chances are that he or she may get top or side upper berth! Or if you have booked for 4-5 persons, chances are that a couple of them may end in a different compartment.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat

Push Pull Ministry

The way Mamata Banerjee rode roughshod over Dinesh Trivedi and his Railway Budget may be a new low for the ministry, but then the  Rail Bhawan has for long been kowtowing to the whims and fancies of incumbent ministers, with brazen partiality towards their constituency and state. More often than not things like project viability, economic feasibility get steamrolled under the minister's pet agendas.
 
The rot became glaringly visible in the early 1980s with A B A Ghani Khan Chowdhary, the mercurial Congressman from West Bengal, as railway minister. Popularly known as Minister of Malda, he used Railways as fiefdom to further his constituency. He made Malda a new rail zone headquarters, gave it a railway stadium, hospital and a factory. The result: Even in the high noon of Marxist dominance in Bengal with Jyoti Basu at the helm, this Congressman bucked the trend by winning successive elections from Malda.
 
This weakness to create new rail division with parochial sentiments in mind is something that afflicted most incumbents in the ministry and the eastern railway zones (namely those in West Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand) became a hot bed for this turf war. Chowdhury's gesture did not go down well in neighbouring undivided Bihar as Malda had encroached upon parts of Dhanbad division. The revenge happened two decades later when Bihari babu Lalu Prasad became railway minister. He hit back by carving out parts of Samastipur and Malda areas in the newly created Bhagalpur division. The energy rich Dhanbad had an unenviable fate of getting latched on to many divisions, thanks to its lucrative freight revenue.  
 
Lalu Prasad as the railway minister draws mixed reactions. During his tenure, at least on paper, the ministry was financially sound - though crictics have dime a dozen theories ranging from fudging of figures to Lalu being so embroiled in Bihar politics that he left the ministry at the hands of some efficient babus - and that did the trick. Anyhow what followed was a political version of Raju ban gaya gentleman with our rustic hero being called up for enviable assignments like lecturing management students from Harvard and Wharton.
 
Fellow Bihari and bete noire Ram Vilas Paswan headed the Rail Bhawan only to create a rail zone in his constituency Hajipur. He yanked off Dhanbad out of the Kolkata-based South Eastern Railway and attached to Hajipur. After he stepped down Hajipur's development was put on slow track. Also distributed the maximum number of free passes (about 50,000), largely to people from his constituency, Hajipur.
 
Jaffer Sharief came to the ministry riding his hobby horse of uni-gauge, with his home state Karnataka in mind. The state had many metre-gauge lines built during princely regimes. The project sought to convert the uneconomical metregauge lines to broadgauge and put his hometown Hassan on the rail network. He brushed aside all opposition from experts and this project even now continues to cost railways dear. Sharief also built a road bridge over a railway crossing in Bangalore, reportedly to clear way to his farmhouse. His favouring of Swedish company Asea Brown Boweri to import locomotives landed him in cloud with allegations of kickbacks.
 
Madhavrao Scindia belonged to the original band of Oxbridge elite (also called 'babalog') brought in by Rajiv Gandhi to run the country. It was an era when computerisation was considered a panacea for all ills and was forced upon the near Luddite government workforce. Not surprisingly Scindia is credited with computerisation of railways. However even he ensured that every budget had something to offer for his constituency Gwalior – a Shatabdi or some train linking to his constituency, though was not as brazen as others.
 
But when his daughter Chitrangadha was getting married to Karan Singh's son, the maharaja in him took over. The Gwalior railway station was paved with marble (obviously with taxpayer's money) to greet the wedding guests.
 
But none of the above transgressions compare with what Mamata Banerjee did when she was directly ruling the Rail Bhawan and later on with her remote control. It is even more disgusting that UPA leadership allowed her to have her way. For hapless rail travellers there is going to be little respite from unclean bogies, stale food and nauseating lavatories plus a dicey journey with outdated safety systems.