If Vajpayee had Golden Quadrilateral, PM Modi writing a rail legacy

Modi's speech at recent event to launch “revamp of 508 rail stations” was touted as “biggest such infrastructure ceremony”. It was also another proof of Modi govt focus on Rlys from the start

Amrit Bharat Station Scheme, Narendra Modi, PM Narendra Modi, Vande Bharat Express, Vande Bharat, Vande Bharat trains, Political Pulse, Indian Express, India news, current affairs

Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the foundation stone laying ceremony of Sant Ravidas memorial, in Sagar, Saturday, Aug 12, 2023. (PTI Photo)

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The August 6 launch of “redevelopment of 508 railway stations across India” under the Amrit Bharat Station Scheme — touted as “the biggest such ceremony in the infrastructure space” — again underlined the Narendra Modi government’s focus on the Railways, and the Prime Minister in particular.

From his presence at the launch of his government’s showpiece Vande Bharat trains, to grand projects like August 6, Modi is there to flag off projects himself.

According to present and former Railway Board members, this focus has been evident right from the start. They talk about the very first time they gave a presentation on the Railways to the new Prime Minister soon after Modi came to power in 2014. The Board had to communicate its present state and future plans in 10 slides. But what was to be a brief presentation stretched to two hours as Modi interjected with questions and conveyed a broad vision for the Railways.

“He spoke of station development, a railway university, faster, cleaner trains, induction of new and clean technologies,” a former Railway Board member recalled, adding that after a slow start, Modi’s pet railway university project, Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya, became a reality in Vadodara in 2018.

“A presentation on the Railways to the PM himself was unheard of,” a former Railway Board member who was part of the meeting told The Indian Express.

Now, the Modi government’s grand plans for augmenting the infrastructure in the rail sector are being compared with what the Atal Behari Vajpayee government did in the road sector via the Golden Quadrilateral, then the grandest road-making initiative since Independence, connecting four major metro cities through a network of highways stretching 5,846 km, for an estimated Rs 60,000 crore.

The Modi government too has opened its purse strings. In its second term, 2009-14, the UPA government invested around Rs 45,980 crore per year to build new assets for the Railways. The Modi government has spent close to three times that amount, every year. In nine years, the total capital spend has been Rs 11.95 lakh crore, on new lines, capacity augmentation of tracks, and newer and faster trains.

On August 6, while laying the foundation stone of the 508 station upgrade projects, Modi listed out the achievements: “In nine years, India has laid more railway tracks than countries like South Africa, Ukraine, Poland, the UK and Sweden… In just one year, India has built more tracks than the entire networks of countries like South Korea, New Zealand and Austria.”

In other words, the Railways constructed around 5,243 km of new lines, including gauge conversion and doubling, in the past year, while in the nine-year period, 25,000 km worth of railway lines were created. This includes 2,200 km of Dedicated Freight Corridors, a project stuck in bureaucratic sloth. The rail network now covers almost the entire Northeast, in one form or another.

While the Vande Bharat trains continue to hog the limelight – with Modi himself flagging them off – less grandiose steps have included merging of the Rail Budget with the General Budget, trimming the size of the Railway Board, granting financial powers down the ranks for faster approvals, and achieving the target of electrifying 100% of broad gauge tracks.

The Amrit Bharat Station Scheme was born after several iterations of the station redevelopment project did not draw private-player participation. Next, there is a National Rail Plan-2030 to upgrade the Railways in critical areas, with the aim to meet the growth in demand all the way up to 2050.

The blemishes though remain. The past nine years have witnessed some of the worst train accidents in India’s history, killing hundreds of passengers, even as the number of such accidents has fallen.

The June 2023 accident involving the Coromandel Express and the Bengaluru-Howrah Express in Odisha, which killed 294 people, was one such example.

After the 2016 derailment of the Indore-Patna Express in Kanpur that killed 150 people, the government had set up a dedicated Rs 1 lakh crore fund to expedite safety-related overhaul called the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh. The amount was to be spent only on replacement, renewal or upgradation of critical safety assets over the next five years.

As per official estimates, accidents per million train kilometres have declined from 0.1 in 2013-14 to 0.03 in 2021-22. However, there is also the example of delays in inquiries following such train accidents – as per a CAG report, in 63% cases, the inquiry reports are not submitted to the accepting authority within the prescribed timelines and in 49% of the cases, there is a delay in accepting the report.

The Modi government has sent a message that this too might be changing after the Odisha accident. In the first such action in recent years, the CBI arrested three Railway employees in connection with the accident.