“Third Class In Indian Railway”

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About 103 years ago (1917), Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi urf Mahatma Gandhi wrote his essay “Third Class in Indian Railway” to draw attention of the British Railway companies to the plight of the common man in trains.

It is debatable whether conditions are better in the General Class now.

As the economy is growing people are traveling more for work, jobs, education, training, medical care etc.

India is a large country with distances by road/rail up to 3500 km. India is also extremely densely populated (3 times of China!).

Overcrowding is common in the trains. But, the most glaring feature is the journey time.

If one is lucky to find seat in the fastest train, it take 60 hours from Amritsar to Thiruvananthapuram, 54 hours from Guwahati to Mumbai, and 48 hours from Patna to Bengaluru.

Less than 2% of the people of India can afford air travel, and travel for distances beyond 500-800 km by road is not an option.

Imagine the wages lost and the exhaustive travel in heat and humidity in summers and in the bitter cold of the winters. What about the infirm and the handicapped?

Imagine the working days lost to the national economy.

Sadly, there is hardly any debate on this aspect of the economic life of the vast majority who can’t afford air travel but they busy to invest thousands of crores on stations, not in speeding the trains.

Surely, faster trains would be a big relief, but that is still unlikely in the next ten years at least as the speed of trains is destined to remain stagnant.

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