Indian Railways (IR) has 16 zones, each headed by a general manager (GM). Let’s go back to the mid-1950s. How many zones were there then? There was Southern Railway, Central Railway, Western Railway, Eastern Railway, Northern Railway, North Eastern Railway and South Eastern Railway. IR seemed to function perfectly well with those seven zones. Those initial zones were partly determined by historical considerations. Logically, zone formation should be decided on grounds of operational efficiency. Surely, there must be some threshold based on economies/diseconomies of scale/scope, even if IR functioning today is more complex than in the mid-1950s. For instance, perhaps 600 stations and/or 5,000 route km is ideal for a zone. No outsider can figure out what the right threshold is. It is for IR to answer the question, but the question must be answered. Clearly, something like South Eastern Railway is suboptimal, even if it was formed as a descendant of Bengal Nagpur Railway. Northeast Frontier Railway was carved out of North Eastern Railway in 1958. This is Jagjivan Ram arguing the case in the 1958-59 Railway Budget speech. “Turning now to other aspects of railway administration and operation, I would first invite the attention of the House to the decision announced some time back to bifurcate the North Eastern Railway and to create a new railway administration with headquarters at Pandu. The Northeast Frontier Railway with a mileage of about 2,000 was inaugurated on the 15th of last month. The creation of this new Zonal Railway Administration, though small in size compared to other units, has been necessitated by manifold considerations — strategic, administrative and operational.”
There cannot be a development objective of setting up a zone for the sake of setting up a zone. Interpreted thus, every district should have a zone. At one point, different gauges, and the lack of the Saraighat Bridge, might have warranted special treatment for the Northeast. With gauge conversion, the only valid argument is one of difficult terrain. Even then, in 1958, we only had eight zones. South Central Railway was carved out in 1966. South Central Railway isn’t suboptimal, if one uses the kind of thresholds I indicated. But I find no attempt to justify this new zone through a Railway Budget speech. If justifications aren’t needed, then zones will be formed at random — East Central Railway in 2002, North Western Railway in 2002, East Coast Railway in 2003, North Central Railway in 2003, South East Central Railway in 2003, South Western Railway in 2003 and West Central Railway in 2003. We thus arrived at that figure of 16 zones and the new zones are all suboptimal. Random means decisions weren’t taken on the basis of efficiency considerations. They had political objectives.
In the Railway Budget speech for 2003-04, Nitish Kumar justified it in this way. “Hon’ble members are aware of the decision to operationalise seven new zones and eight new divisions. The North Western Railway and East Central Railway headquartered at Jaipur and Hajipur respectively have become operational with effect from October 1, 2002. The remaining five new zones, viz, East Coast Railway at Bhubaneswer, North Central Railway at Allahabad, South East Central Railway at Bilaspur, West Central Railway at Jabalpur and South Western Railway at Hubli and eight new divisions headquartered at Agra, Ahmedabad, Guntur, Nanded, Pune, Ranchi, Rangiya and Raipur shall be operationalised withe effect from April 1, 2003... The feedback received indicates that the two new zones that were operationalised with effect from October 1, 2002, viz, North Western Railway and East Central Railway have been functioning with improved efficiency.” Had that assertion been based on actual figures on efficiency indicators, it would have been more plausible. I don’t know if this is true, but I am told Railway Board members complained, in writing, about creation of these new zones. Since decisions are increasingly being taken on rational and non-political considerations now, it might be a good idea to retrace our steps and merge some existing zones.
Each zone is divided into divisions, headed by a divisional railway manager and IR has 68 divisions now. What Kumar did with zones, Lalu Prasad did with divisions — he increased them without any clear rationale. To take one example, North Western Railway has its headquarters in Jaipur and divisions in Jaipur, Jodhpur, Bikaner and Ajmer. West Central Railway has its headquarters in Jabalpur and divisions in Jabalpur, Bhopal and Kota. Where is Kota? It is in Rajasthan and is much better connected with Jaipur than with Jabalpur. So why is the Kota division part of West Central and not part of North Western? Thus, not just zones, we should have a rationalisation of divisions also. Assuming five divisions per zone, optimal route km per zone is around 1,000. Ranchi division, created in 2003, has a route km of around 440. Chakradharpur division has a route km of around 760. Before 2003, today’s Ranchi division was part of Chakradharpur division and no there is no obvious evidence of efficiency having suffered. A similar example is that of Rangiya division, in North East Frontier Railway Zone. Before 2003, it was part of the Alipurduar division. I don’t really see why Rangiya needs to be a separate division.
The writer is a member of the National Institution for Transforming India Aayog. The views are personal