O P I N I O N S

Guest Column
Low-cost high-speed trains on track
The cost of upgrading the track, rolling stock, locomotives and signalling on existing alignments would be much lower than the price tag of Rs 150 crore per km for the viaducts alone for the 250 kmph plus variety.
RC Acharya
IN a recent seminar organised by the Railways in Delhi, as many as 51 speakers talked about high-speed train systems; how to build, run, maintain them; and the amazing technologies they had to offer in the area of traction, signalling, rolling stock, and of course, safety.

Touchstones
In baba-log world, small towns don’t exist
We are all victims of an intellectual and social snobbery that has made us prisoners of beliefs that are almost worthless outside our mental ghettos.
Ira Pande
These days, it is difficult to talk of anything without stumbling over the elephant in the room: the curious case of Modi’s rising popularity. Along with the unending tributes to Sachin Tendulkar from the man on the street to the greatest cricketing wizards of the planet, the TV and our newspapers have little to offer at prime time news hour or op-ed articles.

ground zero
To each his Sachin moment, this is mine
Ever humble in his achievements, few will disagree that Sachin Tendulkar has made the impossible possible by achieving a rare perfection in the game.
Raj Chengappa
While watching Sachin Tendulkar play in his final Test match in Mumbai and listening to the reminiscences of cricketing greats on television, it brought to mind my own ‘Sachin moment’. The year was 1992, the place Australia, and the occasion the India-Australia series followed by the World Cup. I was covering the matches for India Today and had the privilege of not just watching the blossoming of Tendulkar in that series but also profiling him for the magazine as the ultimate cricketing machine.

Guest Column
Low-cost high-speed trains on track
The cost of upgrading the track, rolling stock, locomotives and signalling on existing alignments would be much lower than the price tag of Rs 150 crore per km for the viaducts alone for the 250 kmph plus variety.
RC Acharya

IN a recent seminar organised by the Railways in Delhi, as many as 51 speakers talked about high-speed train systems; how to build, run, maintain them; and the amazing technologies they had to offer in the area of traction, signalling, rolling stock, and of course, safety.

Making use of the occasion, the Rail Minister also announced the creation of a High Speed Rail Corporation as a subsidiary of the RVNL (Rail Vikas Nigam Ltd) to take up such projects, if and when the finances are available.

Japanese Bullet trains were introduced 50 years ago.

Understandably, low-cost solution also implies speeds lower than that of the world-renowned bullet trains, namely Shinkansen of Japan, TGV (Train a Grande Vitesse) of Europe, and CHS (Chinese High Speed) of China, which all run at speeds higher than 250 kmph, with some of them reaching 350 kpmh on short stretches.

What the Railways is aiming at is hiking its existing maximum speeds of some of its premier trains such as Rajdhani and Shatabdi, etc. from 130 kmph to a level of only 160-200 kpmh, which could result in 10 to 25 per cent reduction in transit time depending on how much of the track would be upgraded to run such trains at 160-200 kpmh.

Upgrading the entire 64,000 km of its network being out of the question, only a few sections with a potential for high passenger volumes have been identified. These are Ahmedabad-Mumbai, Howrah-Haldia, New Delhi-Agra-Jhansi-Bhopal, Delhi-Lucknow, Chennai-Begaluru-Mysore, Delhi-Amritsar, and Delhi-Chandigarh.

Among these, Ahmedabad-Mumbai already has 22 trains while Delhi-Amritsar runs 32 trains each day, most of them fully packed!

The cost of upgrading the track, rolling stock, locomotives and signalling to run trains on existing alignments would be very much lower than the price tag of Rs 150 crore per km for the viaducts alone for the 250 kmph plus variety.

Incidentally, the Japanese Shinkansens trains popularly called Bullet trains [on account of the profile of the nose of the driving cab resembling a bullet] introduced nearly half-a-century ago are closer to commuter than long-distance service.

For instance, the 500-km Tokyo-Osaka section carries more than 160 million passengers a year with over a dozen 14 car trains every hour, covering the distance in less than three hours and making daily commute a distinct possibility.

TGVs in Europe also connect major cities, most of which are now only less than three hours away, or provide overnight service between various European capitals, offering stiff competition to the airlines in city center to city center transit time.

So far about half-a-dozen studies carried out for an Indian rollout have been for the high speed viz. 250 kpmh plus variety built as elevated track on a viaduct. Very few of them have considered financial viability based not only on the projected volumes, but also the paying capacity of the passengers for the relatively higher tariff to sustain it as a profitable investment and not degenerate into a basket case, as has been the fate of Reliance’s Delhi Airport Metro line.

On the other hand the proposed low-cost high-speed corridors could also be viewed as a socially desirable investment, which would help to slow down the spiralling growth and even help to decongest Metros such as Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad and Mumbai by spurring the development of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities around them.

In the process it would also help to save on the nation’s fuel bill, reduce air pollution with a more fuel efficient mode of rail transport, reduce road congestion and connected accidents. In addition, reduction of commuter fatigue is perhaps one of the single factors that is making the high- speed services of Japan, Europe and China increasingly popular.

Choice of a section could degenerate into a political one-upmanship among various states and Metros, but its success would ultimately depend on the business model developed and its financial viability, which could even attract private investment in a PPP venture, a concept being vigorously encouraged by the Planning Commission.

Ultimately success would depend on techno-economic rather than political considerations, a concept which our worthy ‘netas’ are unfortunately seldom comfortable with.

The writer is a former member (mechanical) of the Railway Board

Touchstones
In baba-log world, small towns don’t exist
We are all victims of an intellectual and social snobbery that has made us prisoners of beliefs that are almost worthless outside our mental ghettos.
Ira Pande

These days, it is difficult to talk of anything without stumbling over the elephant in the room: the curious case of Modi’s rising popularity. Along with the unending tributes to Sachin Tendulkar from the man on the street to the greatest cricketing wizards of the planet, the TV and our newspapers have little to offer at prime time news hour or op-ed articles. However, while one can understand the nation’s enormous admiration for the Little Master, not many seem to understand the popularity of ‘other’ national icon who is being shaped even as I write this.

Learned debates have been held with the country’s leading political analyists, sociologists, historians and even corporate heads to try and understand his hysterical support base. To my mind, the answer to this puzzle lies in having misread the political power of our cultural diversity.

Poverty is an alien concept to many.

Let me elaborate what I mean by this: it seems that to several of the above worthies who sit in their armchairs in the leafy enclaves of New Delhi’s posh colonies, the small town is almost invisible. They view it as part of a vast dusty landscape, where the great unwashed masses live and nothing works. So they prefer to study it through the prism of field studies (more often than not done by others), opinion polls conducted by dodgy agencies, data from national surveys or from figures put up on government websites. What is more, many of them have just a nodding acquaintance with any language other than the Queen’s English and seldom soil their hands by reading vernacular papers or poison their ears with the Bihari Hindi so dear to our Hindi news and entertainment channels. To many such people (I have them all around me, some in my own family) Hindi movies, ‘saas-bahu’ serials, silly films and filmi lyrics are fodder for lofty sociological pronouncements on the changing idiom of our cultural and creative language. ‘What is happening to this country?’ they tut-tut, as if they occupy another space from the rest of the country.

Sad to say, we are all victims of an intellectual and social snobbery that has made us prisoners of beliefs that are almost worthless outside our mental ghettos. The late Romesh Thapar once called the Rajiv Gandhi era as the government of the ‘baba-log’, who had grown up in an atmosphere so rarified that their only brush with poverty was what they saw in their servants’ lives. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a visit to Allahabad where I drew attention to the destruction of the old Civil Lines lifestyle and shuddered at the chaos of the traffic and breakdown of municipal amenities. That was my ‘baba-log’ moment for none of us are inoculated against our own prejudices. I remember how impressed I was by the flawless Hindi I heard from the contestants on that occasion, quite forgetting that what I perceived as an exotic achievement is the everyday language of the most populous states of this country.

So completely have we been lulled into believing that English is now the lingua franca of large swathes of this country (and secretly laughing at the atrocious liberties taken in its name) that we have lost our own capacity to understand that what divides this country now is not just wealth but language. And by language I mean not just the spoken word but the dreams, aspirations and imagination of our personal world.

It does not need a rocket scientist to tell you that we are most forthright and confident when we speak in our own language. Salman’s Rushdie’s ‘chutnification’ of English was not just a clever stylistic achievement; it gave us our first glimpse into the enormous bank of feelings that lies beneath the puns, aphorisms and proverbs of our native tongues. The truth, dear reader, is that India has changed at a slower velocity than Bharat. So, before we try and conquer Mars, let us try and win back the lost world of the mofussil town and give it its rightful place in the grand symphony of inclusive growth. Charity, doles, fake welfare schemes and false promises have had their time. Now, when even the multinational companies have understood that the next great consumer boom will be led by our small towns and rural areas, our electorate will not settle for anything less than a life of dignity and equality.

Some have made a course correction, some have not. It is as simple as that.