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THE GREAT RAILWAY RIP-OFF By Anthony J. Simoes. On January 26, 1998 the Konkan Railway (KR) was inaugurated with much fan fare. The Konkan Railway Corporation (KRC) and the media continued in their PR-mode which they started in 1990 as a symbiotic relationship. They all gathered at Ratnagiri station for the grand finale. The Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the CMs of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala were the main guests. The locomotive of the inaugural train got derailed before reaching Ratnagiri station, and had to be reloaded onto the tracks. The entire inaugural ceremony was delayed by over four hours. The KRC-media nexus managed to keep this all under wraps. There is one characteristic that the KRC has consistently displayed throughout its 14-year-history. It has always shown that construction, operation and maintenance of Railways was never its forte. Its core competence has always been PR, advertising, mis-information, media manipulation and disinformation. Not necessarily in this order. When reputed and experienced chartered engineers like Urban Lobo and Anthony Remedios called proposed Konkan Railway a nightmare, the KRC and the media insisted on calling it a dream. When those engineers called it a national disaster in the making, the KRC-media nexus called it a national project and labelled the opponents as anti-nationals and dismissed them as part of the anti-development brigade. The KRC and media kept calling the KR "one of the wonders of the world" even as those engineers warned us that it could turn into one of the "blunders of the world". The media waxed eloquent about the KR, as if the KRC was about to land an Indian on the moon. Over the last 14 years the media has painted themselves into a corner and have compromised their own credibility. Now they find it almost impossible to be critical of a Railway that is an unmitigated disaster. >From the safety angle the record is simply atrocious. In the last one year two major accidents have claimed the lives of more than 70 people. Almost 150 have been seriously injured. One third of those are critically injured. There have been over a dozen accidents involving a few deaths and many injuries. Since the so called "commissioning" of the KR there have been over 500 rock falls in cuttings and tunnels which have gone unreported and un-noticed because they did not result in accidents or disruption of services. On the cost front, the KR record in quite ridiculous. In 1990 it was projected to cost Rs 1042 crores with a debt/equity ratio of 2:1. Today, the cost has exceeded Rs.6,700 crores with a eebt/equity ratio of 8:1. Since the Konkan Railway is being subsidized to the tune of Rs 350 crores per year, the BOT (build-operate-transfer) rinciple is well and truly buried without a landslide. In 1990 the KRC predicted so many benefits. They said 120 trains per day would operate on their line; today they have less than 120 trains per week. Trains would run at 160 km.p.h., they predicted. Today the less said about speed the better. In ten years, the KRC would be free of all financial liabilities, they said. Now they are losing Rs 1.5 crore per day and the Konkan Railway is a financial millstone round the neck of India. Besides the Konkan Railway does not own any rolling stock. Every thing that runs on their tracks belongs to other railways like Central Railway, Western Railway, SCR and the like. The Commissioner of Railway Safety (CORS) has also lost his credibility vis-a-vis the KR. When the CORS approves a new line for operation, he first allows only freight trains to use the new line. Only after successful operation of goods trains for six months does he approve the line for passenger trains. In the case of Konkan Railway, the CORS reversed this procedure and violated his own laws. The CORS also wrongly approved the KR tracks for a speed potential of 160 km. p.h. None of the four minimum conditions required for 160 km.ph. Operation exists on the Konkan Railway. The four conditions are: * There should be dedicated tracks (up and down) for hi-speed trains. Konkan Railway is a single track. * There should be no level crossings. KR has a few dozen level crossings. * The entire length of track should be fenced. * All coaches should be air-conditioned. Question: Why did the dream become a nightmare? Answer: The KRC abandoned the Indian Railway Engineering Code (IREC). Safety features are an intrinsic part of the IREC and the route selection which results from the IREC's Final Location Survey looks after all aspects of what constitutes a good railway. It is cheap, comfortable and, above all, safe. For the KRC, safety is like an add-on accessory and hence all the ACDs (anti-collusion devices), Raksha Dhagas, steel nets, inclinometers, mobile phones, patrols and the like. This is like shutting the paddock after the mare has bolted. It turns out to be both expensive and ineffective. Just one exercise will do to establish the superiority of the IREC over KRC's founder chairman E. Sreedharans Konkan Railway Engineering Code (KREC). The original Konkan Railway alignment prepared by the Indian Railways Engineer in Chief J.Y.Marathe, using the IREC, had 24 kms of bridges and 28 kms of tunnels. On the other hand, the alignment drawn up by Sreedharan, using the KREC, produced a railway with 79 kms of bridges and 88 kms of tunnels. This resulted in high costs and the deployment of at least 10 imported technologies using foreign experts. One could also say this made over Rs.5,000 crore to simply disappear into the financial black holes of his tunnels and bridges. E. Sreedharan and B. Rajaram have become victims of their own hubris. They thought they were above the laws laid down in the IREC. Generations to come will, in all probability, continue to pay for this folly. Some will pay with their lives and others will lose their livelihood. -- The writer is an cost engineer, who has been closely following the Konkan Railway issue, which errupted in controversy along part of the route in Goa during the 'nineties. He lives in Goa.
