The Vande Bharat stable of trains is the pride of the Indian Railways, and deservedly so. Their coaches are state of the art, comprising the best in the world in technology and comfort, rivalling air travel at a fraction of the cost. Each set of 16 coaches costs about Rs 130 crore, ten times the cost of an average train; the Railways runs 75 pairs of these trains currently, but plans to raise that number to 4,500 by 2047.

However, the Vande Bharat has an Achilles heel — designed to run at 200 kmph, its average speed is only 76 kmph, no better than the Rajdhani or the Shatabdi of much more ancient vintage, negating its very purpose and expenditure.

Outdated track and signalling technology has simply not kept pace with the more modern rolling stock, not to mention poor maintenance and anti-collision systems and overloaded train schedules. Proof of this lies in the statistics: in the 11 years ending 2023, there were 678 train crashes, resulting in 1,061 deaths (ref. National Crime Records Bureau).

If one were to quantify all accidents — such as people falling off trains or walking on the tracks or mishaps at railway crossings etc. — the figure for just 2023 is a mind boggling 24,678 accidents and 21,835 deaths.

This is the Vande Bharat Paradox — the attempt to impose a modern superstructure on a crumbling infrastructure without proper preparation or 360º planning, driven by misplaced priorities and a publicity-seeking paranoia. And this is not peculiar to the Railways alone, it pervades all our development parameters and sectors.

Take our highways. At 146,204 km, India has one of the largest networks of national highways in the world, and this is expanding at 45 km per day, having increased by 60 per cent since........

© National Herald