Flights of fancy

The railways seem to be toying with the idea of some ultra-fast trains running between the major cities, at speeds up to 250 km per hour.

The first such train is proposed to be run between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, but the chairman of the railway board has mentioned several other proposals, for trains to run between Secunderabad and Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai, and so on. The investment figure mentioned for these projects (and it is not clear how many) is Rs 35,000 crore.

It is possible that the Planning Commission's idea of spending Rs 25,000 crore annually on infrastructure projects may be giving people the idea that there is going to be easy money available for whatever catches one's fancy.

If so, it needs to be scotched very quickly. If such "national pride" projects are pursued, they will be the most spectacular misdirection of resources that this country has seen.

And they will sink the railways financially because such ultra-fast trains run on dedicated tracks, and even if all the air traffic between Ahmedabad and Mumbai is re-directed to such a train service, it will not generate the revenue to service such heavy investment.

Looking at the experience elsewhere, it is no secret that projects like the one connecting England and France under the Channel are usually financial disasters.

The Chinese may set up such projects (like one from Beijing to the nearest airport) to impress visitors, but the hard reality is that India's financial system operates differently.

As anyone with even a nodding familiarity with the reality of Indian railways will testify, what the system needs are not showpiece projects but bread and butter money to upgrade a network that has been starved of investment for many years.

Track capacity is saturated on the trunk routes; you therefore need to invest in new tracks, or signalling and other systems that make it possible to run more trains on the same tracks.

Then, there is no rolling stock available to service growing demand, as a result of which freight traffic is being lost to the roads. Finally, the way to increase capacity on the existing tracks is to reduce the difference in the speeds of freight and passenger trains (so that they can run closer together, and thus make way for more trains).

Instead, the average speed of the goods trains has stagnated at 25 kmph for decades, while passenger trains move at twice that speed. Finally, passengers could do with better coaches and improved amenities""and they do not have to compare with France's TGV or the Japanese Shinkansen.

At the most basic level, what is being asked for is that people do not have to die on railway platforms because of the rush to get into overcrowded coaches.

The railways are already paying for the earlier single-point goal of converting all metre gauge track to the broad gauge, even where the level of traffic did not warrant the change. Other, more pressing investment needs were ignored as a result.

If money that can be made available to the railways is once again to be spent on fanciful ideas that suddenly emerge, then the railways can kiss goodbye to financial viability for the foreseeable future.