Passenger Transportation in Indian Railways : Facilities & Challenges

Indian Railway (IR) is the third largest railway network in the world with 7349 railway stations, 1,44,698 railway bridges, 11461 locomotives, 70937 passenger coaches, 2,77,987 freight cars and 67368 route kilometers. Today IR operatives 22550 trains each day, comprising 13329 passenger train and 9221 freight trains. It transports 3.04 million tones of freight traffic and 23 million passengers every day and 7.2 billion passengers per year. Railways an integral part of the transport network, play a crucial role in facilitating trade. The performance of this sector not only affects the global competitiveness of merchandise trade but also the performance of other service sectors such as tourism. Indian Railways has suffered from chronic and significant under investment as a result of which the network expansion and modernization have not happened at the requisite place leading to an erosion of the share in national freight and passenger traffic. It is management failure which failed to raise voice before the leadership/Govt. to the issue well in advance when Indian Railways major routes were becoming bottle neck for main movement rather major cause for slowing speed of trains due to abnormal delay enroot detention further increasing costs due to increased wagon turn round.