Should Indian Railways be privatized? Balaji Viswanathan, This question pops up in my mind every time someone says IRCTC The capitalist in me wants me to say yes, but given the current state of privately managed railroads in the US, Im not so enthusiastic about the privatization in this case. IR, especially the Southern and Western segments, is run in a very efficient manner by Indian standards. Even though we often complain about the delays, it is never as worse as some of the delays we experience in the US air system, especially around the storm time. Think about the sheer numbers. Indian railways carries 20 million passengers and 2.8 million tons of freight every day in a network spanning 115,000km. In contrast, Americas train system Amtrak carries 30 million passengers in the whole year and entire US air system carries about 1 million passengers per day. Americas airlines are often found fumbling even with this level of traffic. In terms of cost, even an unsubsidized & relatively comfortable AC 3-tier cost about $0.02/km - one of the cheapest in the world. Its pricing is rather transparent and booking is direct (although I hate the fact that south always gets sidelined when it comes to number of routes making it viciously hard to book tickets) than most airline booking. I have spent countless days backpacking the length and breadth of India in these trains and never got such an experience elsewhere. Even the AC-3 tier is quite cheap and in many parts of India (outside the metros) it is not hard to get reserved tickets. You get to meet the widest range of people and on many occasions, I have met random new people gathered around to listen to cricket scores. In the end, if railroad needs to be privatized it needs to be the last department that should be privatized. We have a lot more white elephants such as Air India and BSNL to be taken off the governments management first. I would recommend private sector involvement in a few side systems (such as metro rails) in addition to the Indian Railways. But, Indian private sector is not yet ready to fully manage a complex system like Indian railways.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 11:45:32 +0000
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