<b>Bibek Debroy</b>: Trains and numbers

Since there is a capacity crunch, shouldn't the number of trains be rationalised?

How many trains does Indian Railways (IR) run every day?  You will probably get a figure of around 19,000. That’s based on a break-up of around 12,000 passenger trains and 7,000 goods trains. All three numbers, passenger, goods and total are dated, though they continue to figure on the Railway Board’s website. For instance, there is also a figure (from the 2014-15 IR Year Book) of 9,202 daily goods trains and 13,098 daily passenger trains, a total of 22,300 trains. IR isn’t so large that there should be an anomaly of 3,300 trains per day. The numbers on the Railway