Railways, salt industry trade charges over wagon shortage

The Western Railway and the salt manufacturers from Kutch district are at loggerheads over the issue of providing rakes for transporting salt from the district to other parts of the country.

While salt traders argue that the railways is not providing adequate rakes to them and transporting salt by road is unaffordable, the railways say traders have been indulging in irregularities by overloading every rake provided to them.

However, railway officials here said with a rise in overall production of commodities across the country, there is a shortage of wagons.

The number of orders booked is very high and to cite an example, the Chakradharpur division of the Eastern Railway has pending orders of 21,000 metric tonnes of goods.

"We have already placed orders for more wagons and expect that these will be delivered by March. With the number of orders booked increasing rapidly across the country, it is difficult to meet the demand right away, as it takes time to manufacture more rakes to meet the demand," said Ashutosh Chandra, senior divisional commercial manager of Western Railway.

However, officials in the Railways said for some time now, the Railways has been attempting to check irregularities by salt manufacturers, without much success.

"They cheat the Railways by loading the rakes with more salt bags than they are permitted to. This causes long delays as these additional bags have to be offloaded at Viramgam and the weighbridge gets congested," said a top official of the Western Railway.

He said a huge manpower has been assigned to check this irregularity and awareness campaigns have also been run for salt traders, but they continue to indulge in irregularities.

A railway rake can legally be loaded with between 1,100 and 1,155 bags, depending on the capacity of the bags, which are of the sizes of 50 kg, 60 kg, 70 kg and 75 kg.

"For years, the traders have been overloading every rake by at least 200 more bags. We are wasting manpower just trying to check this malpractice," said an official.

Also, the payment is made per rack, and thus, this amounts to paying lesser amounts to the railways, the official said. The salt industry of Kutch district, which contributes close to 50 per cent of the country's salt production, said the number of rakes being provided by the Railways is grossly insufficient.

The Gandhidham Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which has taken up the matter, said the inability of the Western Railway to provide wagons has hit the industry hard, with huge stocks of salt getting piled up in the district.

While the industry needs at least two or three wagons per day, the Railways has not been providing more than seven or eight rail wagons per week.

Parasmal Nahata, secretary of the Gandhidham Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who also runs a salt business in Gandhidham, said the stock that has piled up in Gandhidham will be of more than 150 rail wagons.

Vikas Patel, a leading salt manufacturer of Gandhidham, said according to Railway rules, empty wagons cannot be taken from Kutch, but the Railways has been doing this.

About the alleged irregularities, salt traders said this was detected some time ago, after which the salt traders had approached the High Court.

"The court has asked the Railway Board to decide on the matter, but there has not been any decision on this as yet," said a salt manufacturer.