The railway as metaphor   April 2011

Photo: Runran

Doubtless the chief ambition of most of them is to be able to fly, an aspiration the state encourages as much as possible through its promotion of cheap air travel. This is, of course, an oxymoron: the costs shuffled off by the traveller and the airline company do not magically disappear; they are merely postponed to the future and spread around to the public at large. It is one of the characteristic anomalies of capitalism that rail infrastructure should, since the 1970s, be deemed uneconomic and unprofitable in the industrialised west while road and air travel continue to be heavily subsidised through public investment in freeways, airports, runways and the like (analogous, and lower, subsidies for rail travel being summarily rejected).

 

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books titled, demonstratively, ‘Bring back the rails’, the historian Tony Judt argues that the recent rediscovery of train travel in Europe has something to do with a return to ‘social’ calculation. ‘We no longer see the modern world through the image of the train, but we continue to live in the world the trains made,’ writes Judt. 

 

For any trip under ten miles or between 150 and 500 miles in any country with a functioning railway network, the train is the quickest way to travel as well as, taking all costs into account, the cheapest and the least destructive … The attractions of a return to ‘social’ calculation are as clear to modern planners as they once were, for rather different reasons, to our Victorian predecessors. What was, for a while, old-fashioned, has once again become very modern.

 

This is skilfully put but also somewhat hopeful. In India, the burgeoning cult of the car and the airplane has relegated the railways to the realm of functional necessity as a carrier of people who cannot afford better. Judt’s viewpoint remains a minority one even in Western Europe (Ryanair lives!), where for long-distance journeys across the continent train tickets are more expensive than airfares, a matter of some bemusement for the Indian traveller.

 

In any case, the experience of travelling by air is very different from going by train. More properly, it is to forgo the pleasures – and tedium – of travelling for the experience of being transported like slabs of meat (which we all are in the end) from one ice-cold, interchangeable terminal to another, without seeing anything other than the sky and the clouds (everywhere the same) en route. For what the airplane denies is precisely the experience of travel: of passing through defined landscapes enclosed by time to one’s destination.

 

But, despite the tedium, for this habitual user of Indian Railways – one who moreover travels second class or ‘ordinary sleeper’ by preference – the cumulative effect of many journeys is illuminating, because illuminated by unexpected observations, chance vignettes. Air-conditioned coaches are no good: one is separated from the panorama by slabs of tinted (usually opaque) glass; the air conditioning is invariably set too high or too low; and the people one meets seem less interesting and less considerate of their fellow passengers. That special circle of hell, the air-conditioned ‘three tier’, invented some years ago, combines the most unappealing aspects of AC ‘two tier’ – the lack of ventilation, the sense of enclosure – with the extreme overcrowding of ‘sleeper’ coaches. But it is popular because it is cheap: since most of us are snobs at heart, the aspiration of travelling in superior comfort is more cheaply fulfilled by it.

 

View from the tracks

Travelling by train, gazing out at the countryside unrolling like a scroll, yields occasional snapshots of wider, more momentous developments: like the exponential growth of rubbish, for example. The train window provides a perfect view of the tide of plastic overwhelming the land: ubiquitous, proliferating, ignored. Some of it is contributed by the trains themselves. One sign of the institutional ineptitude of the railways is its refusal to apply any system for collecting waste generated by travellers, or strewn by them, for proper disposal. Toilets open into the tracks where excrement is vented; passengers are positively encouraged to scatter bottles and wrappers into the countryside. Meanwhile the volume of rubbish generated by settlements of every size, from village to town to city, grows ever larger – if there is not necessarily more to consume for the poor in a country fixated on GDP growth, there is certainly more to throw away in terms of packaging at least. The plastic bag caught in a wayside bush has become the most visible trope of the Indian countryside.

 

Another transformation detectable from trains is in the realm of architecture. The construction boom blowing across India has all but swept away traditional architecture and traditional house styles (certainly in the south and west), replacing them with identikit concrete boxes, hastily slapped together and luridly painted. These may be easier to build and maintain but are far less adapted to the local climate and rural living. And it is in the countryside that this boom – encouraged by state subsidies – is visible in all its concrete ugliness. In Tamil Nadu, there is a state programme to convert all huts into concrete ‘houses’, concrete being the prime symbol of modernity. These funds would be better applied to social services like education and health, in getting them to work properly, where they would be more useful in alleviating poverty than a cosmetic change in housing that leaves livelihoods untouched. 

 

This building frenzy has been accompanied by the rapid proliferation of roads and traffic: a sign of increased consumption by the few and increasing migration by the many in search of work. From the vantage point of the long-distance train, all these elements come together and cohere into a single striking picture: the rebuilding devoid of aesthetic or functional principles, a tide of plastic spreading far into the distance, roads choked with traffic, electric lines, the ubiquitous mobile-phone tower. Less trees – and birds? Is it my imagination or do streams and riverbeds seem drier, more shrunken than before?

 

The railway system itself echoes the assumptions and choices made in other contexts, in terms of what is deemed worth doing and not doing at all; of what is to be modernised and what not, and in what way. The food served on trains remains – despite the tinfoil and plastic – as inedible as ever; the conditions in which it is cooked bear little, if any, scrutiny. There was a time when decent food could be obtained at stations but that is now in the past: the canny traveller is well advised to carry his or her own. The trains themselves are dirtier. On long-haul journeys, it is indigents who sweep coaches; the railways have no staff to clean trains while in use. During a recent trip on the main north-south line, a cleaning crew did put in an appearance about halfway through the journey, at Ballarshah in Maharashtra, to hose down toilets and vestibules: they showed every sign of being contract workers. An institutionalised mechanism to clean trains during journeys (while allowing beggars to beg) would appear to be an elementary service. But the failure to keep public spaces clean is universal in India, a symptom of the general contempt for manual labour and those appointed, or forced, to perform it.

 

The railways’ disdain for the ordinary passenger (a faithful reflection of the contempt displayed by Indian institutions for the poor) was symbolised by the attempt in 2008 to increase the carrying capacity of sleeper (and AC three-tier) coaches by installing an extra berth, raising the number of passengers in each coach from 72 to 81. This made overcrowding unbearable and multiplied the strain on facilities such as toilets and washbasins since there was no way that these could be augmented. The passenger division of the railways is a loss making one – it cannot, in the wider scheme of things, be made profitable for raising fares arouses discontent. The attempt to reduce these losses by making paying passengers supremely uncomfortable was as ill-advised as it was typical: it would have made more sense to obtain the same revenue by increasing fares. The wonder is that the experiment was withdrawn after a year, and the wasteful retrofitting of five thousand coaches, in the teeth of angry complaints of the kind the state is usually happy to ignore.

 

By contrast, the computerisation of the ticketing system has been one of the unqualified achievements of the Indian railways. The website is cleanly designed and works efficiently – except, of course, when it does not, during the peak hours of peak seasons: taken together, they add up to a considerable amount of time. The problem could presumably be solved by harnessing more servers, but that is unlikely to happen until things become desperate. The tatkal system which sets aside a certain number of berths in each train for last minute bookings (once five, now two days in advance of departure) at higher fares is another creative innovation. Since a certain proportion of journeys will always be undertaken at short notice, it makes eminent sense to institutionalise them for the benefit of the railways (in terms of increased revenue) and the traveller, spared the frantic haggling with touts. The constant fiddling with the system under different ministers – Laloo Prasad Yadav extended the booking period while Mamata Bannerjee removed the primary disincentive for overusing it, that of cost, by making tatkal tickets cheaper in the name of populism – has affected its utility without as yet entirely destroying it. In short, the anonymous devisors of the computerised reservations system – and its designers – deserve all the praise that they do not usually get for doing something truly useful.

 

Beyond ticket-taking

So much for success. Unfortunately the infrastructural failings of the Indian railways are more characteristic. Investment in modernisation, of rolling stock and safety systems, is disgracefully low. That trains over most of the country arrive where they are supposed to, often on time and usually without mishap, is not, as some travel writers would have it, a miracle. It is no more than one would expect from a department that employs more people than any other branch of government, barring the police and military. Yet the railways share the characteristic tendency of bureaucracy to be overstaffed at the higher and understaffed at the lower (and more important) levels. More important for the passenger, that is, for whom the number of commissioners giving orders is of far less significance than the number of drivers and signalmen on hand to make sure that trains run safely. Alas, these are never enough. 

 

For all the infrastructure added after 1947, the railways’ safety record can only be described as indifferent. Major train accidents take place every year (more often in the north and east than in the west and south) due to lack of manpower and proper technical systems. Not enough people are employed to carry out critical technical functions; meanwhile investment in safety systems, track renewal and repair, not to mention track expansion, does not even pretend to keep up to the levels required. Unmanned railway crossings are no rarity. During peak seasons, the management of time and trains regularly breaks down. Stations remain slovenly at best, and filthy and overcrowded at worst. All these failings are an index of the way the state views the railways and the railways views its working staff. Typically, one of the few things it is truly efficient at is checking tickets. There may not be enough conductors, but there are enough of them to do their job. Tickets are inspected, fines made out, bribes taken; this is true of most railway zones.

 

The Railways Ministry has long been treated as an instrument of patronage. There is unintended irony in the fact that the man inscribed in middle-class opinion as the worst chief minister of Bihar should be hailed by it as a splendidly efficient railways minister. His achievement of making it profitable won Laloo Prasad Yadav a place in management courses, and invitations to speak at gilded business schools. Yet loading rolling stock and freight trains to capacity – to the limits of safety and beyond – while paying little attention to modernisation would appear to require comparatively little by way of nous. Agreed, Laloo presided over a considerable expansion in freight traffic by running new trains and overhauling the tariff but that merely proves that he was more enterprising than his predecessors – not to mention less cautious about safety. But then, this is how the average Indian industrialist conducts his operations: modernising primarily to save labour costs, and squeezing every last drop out of his workforce. So, perhaps Laloo’s feting – the extravagant praise of short-term success while ignoring long-term deficiencies – was well deserved after all.

 

The basic infrastructure of India’s most important system for moving people and goods is slowly running down as public investment is diverted to air and road travel, patronised in different ways by the wealthy. The expansion of road networks in city and countryside is designed primarily for the car user (and for freight). Buses also benefit though bus passengers derive less advantage than they should as state-owned bus services are allowed to decay in many states (Madhya Pradesh being a prime example) as a prelude to privatisation.

 

In his article, Tony Judt pointed out that the future of rail travel in India and China is secure if only because it remains the most effective method of moving large numbers of people over long distances. So it is. But a secure future does not necessarily translate into an efficient one. The Chinese, more pragmatic, are busy expanding their railway network, including high-speed trains, sometimes at an unacceptable environmental cost (such as the line to Tibet built for political rather than economic reasons). While India (sombre note for the future) is content to keep things chugging along, seeking to maintain the system as cheaply as possible.

 

Yes, rail travel will probably endure, no matter what. And so will its pleasures, inseparable from the boredom of actual travelling. The countryside peeling away, unexpected vignettes, chance-met travellers, the blowing wind, the grime of stations, the sensation of movement, of being carried across actual landscapes, the true valuation of time, the enforced solitude and lack of occupation (except what the traveller is able to devise by way of thinking and reading) – these are some of the gifts that trains provide through the experience of travel that changed the world forever during the 19th century. We had better keep the rails in good order for there is nothing quite like them.

 

-- Shashank Kela worked for many years in a trade union of Adivasi peasants in western Madhya Pradesh. He is now a full-time writer in Chennai.