Tracks of history

Indian Railways

The Weaving of a National Tapestry

Bibek Debroy, Sanjay Chadha, Vidya Krishnamurthi

Penguin

225 pages; Rs 229 (paperback)

A few years back, on a trip from New Delhi to Kolkata, my travelling companion in the first-class coupe of the Rajdhani was an aspiring politician from Gaya. Learning that I worked for a Bihar newspaper — I was then a subeditor at the Patna desk of The Telegraph — he started discussing national politics with me. Soon, he produced a bottle of Chivas and, as he drank steadily, his narrative became tinged with nostalgia. 

“Back in the 1980s, when I was a student in Delhi,” he said, “the Rajdhani did not stop in Gaya. But I wanted to travel in the train, so I asked my father to make it happen.” His father, a local politician, went to the stationmaster and told him to make the train stop. When the stationmaster refused, the doting father informed him that the safety of his family in the town could not be guaranteed. “And that’s how my father made the Rajdhani stop for me,” said my proud travelling companion.

“Every Indian seems to have at least one romantic railway memory,” writes Gurcharan Das, the series editor of Penguin’s The Story of Indian Business, in the introduction of the book under review. The sheer number of references to the railway in Indian literature, film, and the other arts is proof of it. Who can forget the haunting whistle of a steam engine in “Chalte, chalte...”of Pakeezah (1972) or Apu and Durga running through a field of kaash in Pather Panchali (1955)? But this book is not a collection of romantic anecdotes. 

Mr Das writes, “The railways were born of the industrial revolution. ...Karl Marx... predicted that railways would create an industrial revolution in India and transform the country. They did not.” He also notes that unlike major powers such as the US, Germany and Russia, where the railways drove the industrial revolution, nothing of the sort happened here. The book tries to explore why, examining at the same time the historical development of this national asset.

It had a serendipitous origin in the committee set up by the Railway Board and ministry in 2014 to suggest ways to make the railways more efficient. Bibek Debroy, a Business Standard columnist, was the chairman and Sanjay Chadha was the secretary of the committee, which also included Mr Das as a member. Vidya Krishnamurthi, then with the NITI Aayog, helped draft the committee’s report, which was submitted in 2015. “As work progressed, we realised that we were not just interested in the Indian Railways as it currently existed, but were also interested in the Indian Railways of yesterday.” Those of us interested in quizzing would know that the first passenger train ran between Mumbai (then Bombay) and Thane in 1853, but the authors begin their narrative two decades before in the 1830s.

The book is divided neatly into five chapters, representing the chronological development of the railways in India from the 1830s to the middle of the 20th century. The neatness belies the haphazardness of how things progressed, as they usually do. These chapters are also filled with interesting anecdotes and characters. For instance, the engineer Arthur Cotton, who, in the 1830s, had planned out an experimental railway line between Madras and Chintradipet; the three-mile-long Red Hill Railroad was supposed to have animals pulling the train — though it had a few steam engines as well. However, after a brief stint in Tasmania, possibly on medical leave, Cotton changed his views completely and became a great advocate for irrigation and waterways than railways. There is also Rowland Macdonald Stephenson, who in the 1850s, wanted to build a railway line between Calcutta and Hong Kong. Many such narratives keep the reader absorbed throughout the slim breadth of this volume.

The book is also timely because of some pertinent changes in the functioning of the railways in recent times. The introduction of flexible fares, especially on premier trains, and a shifting focus on freight are important, but more than that, the scrapping of the Railway Budget. For the first time in 93 years, FY18 got no Railway Budget, which was merged with the Union Budget. According to newspaper reports, the committee chaired by Mr Debroy suggested this change as a separate Budget for the railways, being a very small part of the general one, hardly made fiscal sense. With more fiscal discipline, and less politicisation, it is now expected to lead to a more effective functioning of the railways. Perhaps the authors can think of adding a new chapter on how the railways changed since 2017, when they bring out an updated edition a few years later.