The surprising truths the pandemic has exposed about Railways' functioning

While better performance this year shows the enterprise could do without its passenger train service, the downside is that there is little scope for its operating ratio to drop below 90%

First the good news. The Indian Railways could show a far better performance this year because it hardly ran any passenger trains. If the social distancing norms persist beyond March 2021, the Railways could actually get a positive net revenue in FY22 than those achieved so far by suppressing costs. 

The bad news is that even then the key performance metric of the Railways, the operating ratio (OR), a measure of how much it costs them to earn every single rupee (the percentage of total working expenses to gross earnings) shall not improve to less than 90 per cent. Had