We often seem to forget that our railways don’t need to improve at all, given how perfect they already are
Commuters at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus on July 19. Pic/Atul Kamble
I don’t want to mention the horrific accident that claimed a few hundred lives last month because, as we already know, India has moved on. Maybe I shouldn’t even use the word ‘horrific’, given the insinuation that this was a massive tragedy. Ours is a country where life is cheap, so the use of ‘horrific’ may feel like scaremongering, which is something I am loath to do. There was an accident, people died, and that is all. Why make it sound more important than it was?
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This is one of the nicest things about India; a trait most other countries would do well to try and emulate: We have a ‘can-do’ attitude that allows us to brush our shoulders, shrug off any bad news, and get on with our lives as if nothing has happened. Poor infrastructure? No problem. Lack of healthcare? It happens. No help from the government during a pandemic? Nobody’s fault. Crimes against minorities and women? We have more important things to worry about. It’s a gift, really, and one we should work harder to protect at all costs.
Some would argue that there is a massive downside to this approach because it allows people to get away with murder and incompetence, but that is unfair. Why should we give death more importance than it deserves? As a spiritually inclined nation, we should be allowed to treat these minor mishaps with nonchalance. Everyone born here knows that the only certainties we have are life, death, and communal riots, so why be over-dramatic? Why not replicate what our news channels do and focus on how Zara Hatke Zara Bachke has performed at the box office instead?
This is also why we should do away with old-fashioned terms like ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’. They crop up regularly when something bad happens, but have no place in a vibrant, world-beating economy like ours. The most annoying thing in the aftermath of that accident, for me, was how people kept asking for heads to roll. They wanted someone to be held responsible for the senseless and presumably unnecessary deaths of innocent travellers.
These were obviously the same people upset about other smaller accidents over previous years, all of which we have put behind us, and none of which I intend to mention again. They wanted the railway minister to resign, and I was appalled at the thought. What could the minister possibly have done? The poor man had so little to do with the railways that I didn’t even know his name, or of his existence, until he showed up before assembled journalists and held a signalman or two responsible. Why does a minister have to resign just because we need to pin the blame on someone?
As far as I was concerned, he had done his duty. Everyone knows it is the Prime Minister’s role to inaugurate a project, and the duty of subordinate ministers to face the press when that project fails. The railway minister met his job description, so where was the question of a resignation?
What we tend to forget, whenever accidents like these occur now and again, is that the Indian Railways is already the world’s most perfect network. There is probably nothing it needs to work on because it has everything under control and has functioned efficiently since it was founded in the 1800s. Wikipedia informs me that it manages the world’s fourth-largest national railway system by size, with a total route length of 68,043 kilometres. It runs 13,169 passenger trains daily, apparently and received its highest-ever allocation of Rs 2.4 lakh crore in the Union Budget 2023-24. If a few trains fail to arrive at their destination, that is only to be expected. How is a mere Rs 2.4 lakh crore meant to ensure safety as well as punctuality? Passengers really should be asked to pick one or the other at the time of making a reservation.
We don’t appreciate what we have when we look at our trains. Log on to the IRCTC website to see how amazing it is. We only see crumbling stations, filthy toilets and overcrowded passageways. We don’t see how comfortably millions of Bombayites travel from Virar to Churchgate without a fuss, how we have so much room to stretch on those commutes, and how everything runs like clockwork. If a minister must resign, it is only if this faultless system starts to falter. Until that happens, we should send him our blessings and hop onto the next train.
When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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