The Functioning of Indian Railways during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The extant COVID-19 pandemic has evinced the sheer ephemerality of human existence. Contrary to our conventional beliefs, the human race, notwithstanding its incredible ability to innovate and sophisticate, may not be the master race on planet Earth. There shall always be one aspect of the biosphere or another that shall prove more deleterious to humans than we as humans would prove to one another. That being said, the fundamental instinct of survival compels us humans to understand complex structures and systems, and propels our innovation. It is but natural, therefore, for us humans to marshal all our problem-solving abilities and resources to eventually prevail over the pandemic, regardless of its hitherto unseen virulence.

Geopolitical differences aside, every nation is in consonance with the tenet that a coordinated fight against the mutated Coronavirus is of utmost essence. Yet, the challenges faced by every nation are unique, and ipso facto must implement solutions that befit such challenges. Notwithstanding its status as a developing nation, the Republic of India has made contributions none less significant than the impressive those of other nations. This disquisition is an endeavour at studying the monumental role of the Indian Railway system in India’s fight against the pandemic.

The Indian Railway system is one of the largest in the world, both in terms of its network as well as the employment provided by it. It is operated by the Government of India through the Ministry of Railways. It is often termed as the “lifeline of the nation” owing to its momentous role in transport of goods and passengers and networking India in a sociocultural and economic manner. The data presented in this assignment may change dynamically owing to the rapidity of the changes in response; however, best efforts have been undertaken at referencing only the most recent data.

Facts as we know them

The Indian Railway Health Services (IRHS) has adopted a “multipronged strategy to fight Covid-19” (Patel, Chandra Kant et al). The deployment of over 2500 doctors and 35000 paramedic staff as well as identification of 5000 beds in 17 dedicated hospitals and 33 hospital blocks would evince the efforts undertaken by the IRHS. Its community centres have been converted into quarantine centres and “additional doctors and paramedics are engaged to manage added workload due to increasing COVID-19 cases” (Ibid). Railway production units and workshops have manufactured and continue to manufacture sample collection booths, additional hospital cots and furniture, HAZMAT suits and coveralls, masks as well as sanitizers.

One of the most commendable steps taken by the Ministry of Railways has been its conversion of 5231 rail coaches into Covid-19 care centres. Chandra Kant Patel et al note that those coaches have been modified to be utilized in the areas where State has exhausted the facilities and needs to augment capacities for isolation of both suspect and confirmed COVID cases. Every coach has been fit with an oxygen supply facility. In order to ensure comfort, the middle-berth has been removed and mosquito nets fitted on the windows. Anaesthesiologists have been playing a particularly important role in basic ventilator management in the Intensive Care Units. The advantage of using coaches in such a manner is that they can be moved from one place to another when the available public health facility of that place has been exhausted.

Above all, special parcel trains have been instrumental in the transportation of a significant 5.2 million tonnes of food grains across the country. Ankita Sharma et al note that the railways has been providing bulk cooked food with paper plates for lunch and food packets for dinner through IRCTC base kitchens, RPF resources and contribution of NGOs. As of 20 April, Indian Railways crossed the “three million mark in distribution of free meals.” It has also ensured that it makes medical equipment and supplies, PPE kits and other general goods available.

Administrative Measures in order to further help the railways

A substantial amount of information with regard to the response towards Covid-19 by the railways has been obtained by Ankita Sharma & the Strategic Investment Research Unit’s seminal report titled, “Indian Railways vs. Covid-19”. Enlisted hereunder are some of the executive measures taken by the government, taken liberally from the aforesaid report:

• Creation of an ‘Online Dashboard’ for better coordination between officials of the Railway Ministry and various Zonal Railways. The dashboard has proven useful in daily monitoring of the progress of Covid-19 preparedness activities.
• Creation of a “Covid-19 Rapid Response Team”. This team comprises of six executive directors from the Railway Board to coordinate the efforts of Indian Railways across all zones. For the uninitiated, the Indian Railways has a total of seventeen zones in which it operates. The system is such that one nodal officer from each zone serves as a point of contact for all Covid-19 preparedness measures and is in constant touch with the Response Team.
• The central government has been punctilious in issuing advisories to passengers, instructing them to avoid all non-essential train journeys as well as to ensure that they do not have running fever while commencing a journey. Passengers have also been instructed to contact the railway staff in the event that a passenger feels that he or she is having fever, for the purposes of medical assistance.

Other crucial functional measures

• Indian Railways had facilitated the return of students stranded in northern part of the country, due to sudden closure of educational institutions, to their homes in southern, northern-eastern and eastern regions of India.
• A total of 155 low occupancy trains were cancelled up to 31 March 2020. Such a move was intended to discourage non-essential travel and overcrowding of trains. The Ministry of Railways also assured that adequate arrangements would be made to facilitate hassle-free refund to passengers affected by train cancellations.
• The price of the platform ticket was raised to Rs. 50 wherever necessary in a further bid to avoid unnecessary crowding at railway stations.
• Yet another measure, which was essential notwithstanding its rudimentary character, was to ensure regular announcements on railway stations and in trains to sensitize public about COVID 19.
• Railway Emergency Cell for COVID was formed as a comprehensive nation-wide unit comprising of about 400 Officers and staff from Railway Board to Divisions. It handles queries, requests and suggestions every day, mostly on a one-to-one basis.

Such a phenomenal endeavour by the Indian Railways has ensured inter alia the effective functioning of local administration in the quest to prevent the spread of the virus to the greatest extent possible. Some district administrations such as the West Singhbhum in Jharkhand have developed a non-contact, low-cost, telephone-booth-style sample collection centre. They have in part been “inspired by similar centres in South Korea” (Sen, Nilanjana et al). West Singhbhum is important in part on account of it being behind the national average in terms of health and nutrition, education, agriculture and water resources, financial inclusion and skill development, and basic infrastructure. Courtesy of the functioning of supply chains ensured by the Railways, the administration has had little shortage of necessary equipment and has been able to conduct necessary physical examinations in a cost-effective manner, thereby partly offsetting the disadvantages of being behind the national average in the aforementioned indicators. The local administration has worked in particular with NGOs and even religious organizations in order to ensure the smooth functioning of the same.

Increasing efficiency of Railways

There have often been observations about the highly centralized nature of the railway system. It is by and large centrally planned. It is a small group of bureaucrats that has charge of the command and control mechanisms. This is not inherently a negative phenomenon. In the immediate aftermath of independence, such a move would have been deemed essential by the founding fathers for the purposes of nation-building. Railways would have served as a strategic asset, for it would enable a thorough integration of hundreds of princely states, many of which were foreign-governed earlier, and which had disparate sociocultural realities. Some of them had also been inimical to one another. Centralized planning would indubitably have projected the idea of India as a single, unified nation notwithstanding the differences, which is why the government nationalized all the railway companies under the British Raj into a single, standardized entity.

Conventionally, even the construction of a platform shelter would have to be approved by the Railway Board. Such extent of centralization would render local managers helpless — for they would merely be able to submit recommendations and wait for an approval from Delhi. Given that the Indian bureaucracy can often be entangled with procedural delays, this may pose an obstacle to high efficiency. Therefore, decentralization at this point in time, particularly during the pandemic, may prove highly efficient provided all of the zonal offices network amongst themselves in a highly professional manner.

Making the train operations more profitable

The Railway officials often find that they are unable to marshal finances and that their revenue recovery is bad. However, it is often on account of the fact that trains are more often than not run on such routes as are more or less nugatory. There is not much demand for trains to run on those routes, and that there are few trains available in locations where there actually is a high demand. Writing for 24coaches.com, an author demonstrates the following:

The 17321/2 mega white elephant express takes 21 hours to run on a route from Hubli to Mumbai via Solapur. And it predictably runs completely empty. And it runs on a weekend. Now, there is insane demand between Hubli and Bangalore on weekends. If South Western Railways had any understanding, it would have cancelled this train and use that terribly underutilised rake to run a weekend Hubli-Bangalore biweekly (ex-UBL: Fri, Sun, ex-SBC: Sat, Mon — The rake runs as 12777/8 on other days). This way it will benefit way more passengers and bring in a lot more money.

The author makes another very interesting case. She accentuates that there are innumerable people from Kerala who live in Bangalore. However, only three daily overnight trains run: one to north Kerala and two to south Kerala. She points out that extant trains could not handle even 10 percent of the demand. Therefore, the railways would do well to run such trains as would be necessary in this situation. It is true that passenger trains have been shut on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the IRCTC has announced 230 special trains for passenger services. Abundant safety measures have been undertaken in order to ensure the safety of the passengers and prevent the spread of the virus.

While many of the aforesaid solutions are better suited in normal times when rail travel functions at peak capacity, the government could also take into account the fact that train travel could significantly increase with the increased need to search for jobs and travelling for the same. The railways would need to specifically cater to that demand and make the train operations more profitable. This could, in the long run, ensure a greater amount of funds dedicated to public service and relief efforts presently undertaken. The railways having envisaged a loss of Rs. 40,000 crore this financial year on account of the pandemic, making train operations more profitable would be of all the more essence.

Removal of stoppages

According to some reports that Indian Railways has been working with IIT-Bombay in order to formulate a “zero-based” timetable. In accordance with the same, over six thousand unnecessary train stoppages of regular train services were to be shed. While making the timetable, they have considered the criterion of a minimum of 50 people embarking and disembarking in a day for keeping a stoppage. The new timetable is expected to create more room for goods and passenger carriers, thereby resulting in better speed and efficiency.

The advantage thereof can be realized in its entirety with the resumption of regular train services, for a much, much larger number of trains travel across more destinations with fewer constraints under normal circumstances, thereby saving a phenomenal amount of resources and time in the long run. However, with the central government gradationally approving resumption of a limited number of trains, it would theoretically be possible to ensuring efficiency even at such a stage. It has, in fact, been noted that efficient working of trains could add 1% to the national GDP. Amitabh Kant, the CEO of NITI Ayog notes in an article on Times of India that the government would need to involve best resources by means of public private partnership (PPP).

It is natural to view the aforesaid solutions with skepticism, for there is hardly any corrective that would yield short-term solutions. However, one would well be able to understand the significance thereof with the analogy of “economies of scale”. The term refers to cost advantages earned by companies with the achievement of efficiency in production. Efficiency enables the companies to manufacture more with the same cost as earlier, thereby allowing them to manufacture more. Thus, the company earns more with every additional unit of good. In a similar way, the advantages of implementing the solutions in the foregoing paragraphs would best be realized only in the long-term when they are implemented across India, thus making railway operations more cost-effective and functionally efficient.

Conclusion

The pandemic has certainly provided the government with an impetus to restrict rail travels in particular, hoping to prevent community spread to the greatest extent possible. However, it need be taken into consideration that the economy has suffered severe setbacks on account of the same. This, combined with the fact that the mortality rate owing to the virus is at a mere 1.77% and decreasing, makes for a compelling case in favour of the resumption of train services, albeit in a phased manner, with strict enforcement of safety measures. It is for a significant reason that the Indian railway system is considered the lifeline of the nation. Rejuvenating it is one of the best steps that can be implemented in order to invigorate the national fight against the Covid-19 pandemic.

WORKS CITED

Bhalerao, Sheetal. “Indian Railways Removes 6000 Stoppages To Make Trains Faster!” Trak.in — Indian Business of Tech, Mobile & Startups, 27 July 2020, trak.in/tags/business/2020/07/27/indian-railways-removes-6000-stoppages-to-make-trains-faster-zero-based-timetable/.

“COVID-19: Railways’ Refund Exceeds Earning from Passengers in Q1, but Freight Holds Ground, RTI Finds.” Moneycontrol, MoneyControl, 2020, www.moneycontrol.com/news/india/covid-19-railways-refund-exceeds-earning-from-passengers-in-q1-but-freight-holds-ground-rti-finds-5691111.html.

Kant, Amitabh. “How Indian Railways Can Emerge as a Key Driver of the Indian Economy.” Times of India Blog, Times of India, 20 July 2020, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/how-indian-railways-can-emerge-as-a-key-driver-of-the-indian-economy/.

Patel, Chandra Kant, et al. “Railway Anaesthesiologists and Indian Railway COVID-19 Management System.” Indian Journal of Anaesthesia, 2020, www.ijaweb.org/temp/IndianJAnaesth6414132-5093203_140852.pdf.

Sen, Nilanjana, and Abhik Palit. “India’s Local Governments Tackling COVID-19.” Pursuit, The University of Melbourne, 22 Aug. 2020, pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/india-s-local-governments-tackling-covid-19.

Sharma, Ankita. “Indian Railways vs COVID-19: A Case Study.” Invest India, Strategic Investment Research Unit, 5 May 2020, www.investindia.gov.in/siru/indian-railways-vs-covid-19-case-study.

Theevandi. “What Is The Indian Railways’ Real Problem?” 24Coaches, 2017, 24coaches.com/what-is-the-indian-railways-real-problem/.