I've said it before and I'll say it again for the doubtful benefit of this hearing-impaired government — putting old wine in new bottles doesn't change the wine for the better. A prime example is the Indian Railways and its slew of hyped-up new trains — Vande Bharat, Tejas, Namo Bharat and others — along with the claim that they have transformed the way Indians travel. They haven't. They have just made travel more expensive.

Last month I had to go to my hometown, Kanpur, to revitalise my withering roots and decided to travel by the Delhi–Varanasi Vande Bharat, touted as the last word in luxury, speed and punctuality. It was my first time on a Vande Bharat. It turned out to be none of these.

The fallacy began to unravel on platform 16 of New Delhi railway station itself, where I arrived at 2.30 pm for the 3.00 pm departure. The train arrived two hours late and finally left at 5.20 pm — two-and-a-half hours behind schedule. So much for punctuality.

Worse, there was almost no information shared with the hundreds of waiting passengers. Every now and then a bored announcement would inform us that the train "is delayed by 15 minutes". It was always 15 minutes — not a minute less or a minute more.

This instalment-style announcement of delays, copied from the airline industry, is inexplicable in this age of real-time information when a train's actual location can be tracked minute by minute. Why not share that information with the passengers who........

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