The fall in number of passengers of Indian Railways

The news report that passenger traffic on the Indian Railways fell by 150 million in the first five months of the financial year is alarming. Such a sharp fall of passengers in a buoyant economy only spells trouble for an organisation which is the backbone of the transport sector. This is certainly only a precursor on how the deterioration in quality of services is going to impinge on the growth of railways in the coming years. Worse things are likely to happen soon.

Railways are in an unenviable situation as high freight rates have already substantially shrunk the railways share of the freight market over the last few decades. A sizable contraction of passenger traffic in such a scenario will not only substantially dent its performance but even put a big question mark on the financial viability of the organisation. This is something the country cannot afford especially at a time when talks are on for a substantial expansion of investments to improve railway infrastructure.

But there is nothing astounding about the current fall in passenger traffic as the railway authorities will like us to believe. In fact the railways own data show that such a decline could have been easily anticipated from the trends in recent years. The numbers show that growth of passenger traffic on the Indian Railways had peaked as early as 2011-12 when it added 573 million passengers in the year taking the total passenger traffic to 8224 million.

The year was a turning point in the history of Indian Railways as growth of passenger traffic has steadily decelerated and even declined since then with the additional passengers added dwindling sharply each year. Thus additional passengers carried by Indian Railways slid down to 197 million in 2012-13 and then went dropped sharply to just 4 million in 2013-14. The last year was the worst year for the railways so far as the passenger traffic even declined by as much as 192 million in the year. So the 150 million fall in passenger traffic in the first five months of the current year only shows that the decline has now accelerated further.

Last year’s numbers show that the bulk of the fall in passenger traffic happened in a few zones. Of the 17 zones in the Indian Railways as many as 15 registered a fall in passenger traffic with the number of passengers declining between 0.2 million and 40.5 million. Passenger traffic increased in only two zones in the last financial year namely in the East Coast Railway and Central Railway respectively.

Most of the decline in passenger services in the last financial year was in seven zones where the fall was higher than 10 million each. These include Eastern Railway (40.5 million), Northern Railway (26.7 million), Southern Railway (23.9 million), North Eastern Railway (23.7 million), South Central Railway (23.7 million) and East Central Railway (17 million). This indicates that the fall in passenger traffic on Indian Railways was extensive and spread across most geographical regions of the country. At best one can only say that the intensity of the fall was slightly milder in the Western region.

According to the railways most of the fall in passenger traffic was accounted by suburban services and short distance travellers. Obviously the growing number of young people joining the workforce finds the quality of railway services too bizarre for the comfort. The long queues, overcrowded trains and the less than clean surroundings have obviously gone even below tolerable levels. Safety and security concerns and erratic timings only add to the problems.

Consequently most short distance travellers and urban office goers are dumping the railways for other alternative transport services. The only segment that continues to post a pickup are the passengers in the reserved category who travel much longer distances and have no choice of alternative transport services like airlines which are more expensive.

Clearly the railways have failed to anticipate the trends in the passenger traffic and plan out remedial strategies. The political leadership which pitched for holding down passenger fares rates and ignored the quality and safety issues have certainly overplayed their hand. A lot will depend on how the current railway minister Suresh Prabhu steps in to handle the situation. His focus on substantially hiking investments in his first railway budget provides some reasons for hope.