by SHASHANK KELA
Who travels by train nowadays? Those who cannot afford to fly; or those going to places that cannot be reached by air; or those who, out of habit, find a train more convenient, at least some of the time. But to travel by train for reasons of cost and to travel on trains by choice are two different things. In India, the majority of people use trains only irregularly, if at all, because they cannot afford them – a fact too often overlooked. But that still leaves a huge number of travellers, almost all belonging to the lower echelons of the famous – and famously feted – middle class, to patronise the world’s largest railway network.
Doubtless the chief ambition of most of them is to be able to fly, an aspiration the state encourages as much as possible through its promotion of cheap air travel. This is, of course, an oxymoron: the costs shuffled off by the traveller and the airline company do not magically disappear; they are merely postponed to the future and spread around to the public at large. It is one of the characteristic anomalies of capitalism that rail infrastructure should, since the 1970s, be deemed uneconomic and unprofitable in the industrialised west while road and air travel continue to be heavily subsidised through public investment in freeways, airports, runways and the like (analogous, and lower, subsidies for rail travel being summarily rejected).
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(Thanks to Mukul Dube)