Indian railways -from my perspective

It all started on 16 april 1853 when hauled by sind sultan and sahib ,first train in india ran on mumbai thane route for 45 minutes and 21 miles.IR believed to be the masterstroke of raj also became a glue for indian ambitions regardless of any class caste occupation religion language.Though IR is being considered as spinal cord of this country but it itself is suffering from various ills which if not rectified will belie the very notion that IR is too big to fail.my whole focus on these articles will be to first go into problems faced by railways and then to go for solutions possible.i wish that readers will give their valuable feedback.

now i want to enumerate the various problems faced by IR-

1)capacity saturation

you must have observed the trains waiting at outer.reason for that is no avalability of platform for the incoming train and thats because we are runing more trains including goods trains or passenger trains or mixed trains than the line capacity of track and result is overall fall in avg speed of trains and so happen the gruesome delays.

2)unmet consumer demand

Our route ength increased by 23% al these years while passenger oad increased by 1500%.Its  very common in our experiences that for example you book a ticket on rajdhani/shatabadi/other mail/express trains even well in time still you get a waiting list number.The plight of freight customer is even bad as he has no idea about when his consignment will get delivered bcz there is no time tabling of goods trains.Here road sector is taking its leads.Once while during a jouney i happen to meet a truck exporter on delhi mumbai route and what he told me is that a truck service from delhi will run as 24 hr or 28 hr or 48 hr delivery basis depending on the money paid while in case of rail transport only the almighty knows ehen a train after marshalling will reach its destination.

3)no clarity of role

Its very unfortunate that we are not able to recognise even today that either we are for social purpose or going for comercial profitability.Social cost for indian railways like carrying foodgrains at lower freight rate or running trains or unremunerative routes etc costing it 2500 cr.Though committee f secretaries decided to reimburse railways for this but no action on ground yet.

4)departmentalism

indian railways have nearly 10 services(including medical and police force).There are some posts which are common for all services like post of general manager or divisional railway manager and for those posts fierce competition is there.Not only this there is a fixed quota of these top posts getting filled by either service and that introduction of quota itself limits the merit of an officer.GMs and DRMs got lot of their time wasted in managing this inter dept rivalry 

5)no sense of ownership

i believe this is the problem common from side of both passenger and railways.from the side of passenger,how many of us make it sure that a cup of tea we drank while travelling on train is being disposed in dustbin adjoined with coach.There is common scene on platform where after a train departs there use to be lot of empty packets of chips,biscuits etc lying on tracks.From the side of railways,DRMs or GMs have very less sense of ownership as they are birds of passage and moreover out of box ideas are not given their due regard in the system of ''yes sir ''.

                                                                                                                      There are many more problems facing IR and i will write more on it.All suggestions and comments are welcome.