Stop signals

India is not new to the politics and the economics of announcements. This consists, essentially, of the government announcing a project with an eye to easy popularity and with both eyes closed to feasibility questions. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the proposed dedicated freight corridor should be running into stop signals on technical grounds. Simply put, it is going to cost more, take longer, and involve problems that were not foreseen earlier. Instead, such was the hurry to be seen doing something dramatic for India's wilting transport infrastructure that the proposal was taken to the Cabinet, which duly approved it four months ago, without ensuring that everything was in order.

Now the birds are coming home to roost. One of these consists of the finding by the new body, called Dedicated Freight Corridor India Ltd (DFCIL), which is the special purpose vehicle created for the project. DFCIL appears to have pointed out a problem that should have been obvious from the start: the limited capacity of existing physical structures such as road over-bridges. It seems that many of these will have to be modified (to run double-stack container trains), and perhaps as many as 3,500 new ones constructed. This is not all. A fair amount of land has to be acquired "" no one knows how much "" and that is obviously a problem after Singur, Nandigram, Posco, Tata Steel et al. Then there is the finance ministry, which is muttering under its breath that funding for the Rs 28,300-crore project was not finalised before rushing off to the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs for investment clearance. The Japanese, who are funding part of the project and want to sell their locomotives, want the trains on the corridor to be pulled by electric engines. The Indians prefer diesel engines. A compromise is being examined whereby one of the corridors "" which? "" will have electric trains and the other diesel. No decision has been taken.

There is, then, the problem of integrating the older operations with those of DFCIL. After all, the new lines will be fed from the old network. This implies a set of operational difficulties that can be sorted out only by integrated control. But that is a euphemism for the railways controlling the DFCILs, whereas others, notably in the Planning Commission, want these to be independent so that the corridors will provide competition to the railways. This is just a short list of the details that have not been worked out. One should expect the list to grow as the weeks and months slide by. In short, the government has rushed into something for which adequate groundwork was not done beforehand.

The idea is good, though, and not least because more and more countries have begun using separate corridors for passenger and freight. However, India does need to ask itself a fundamental question: should the high-speed corridors be used for passengers or freight traffic? China uses it for passengers, leaving the existing corridors for freight. Germany is doing it the other way round. The US, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and South Africa link their mines to ports via separate freight corridors but these are not high-speed ones. The economics of separation thus needs to be worked out carefully.