I don’t know about what you did on April 14 this year – the day Hindus celebrated Ram Navami (the birthday of Lord Rama), the epic hero who had seen the construction of a make-shift bridge over the ocean with the help of a friendly monkey brigade to reach Lanka and rescue his better half Sita, taken hostage by Demon Ravan. But I was transfixed in a hall full of aspiring logistical practitioners listening in rapt silence to the speech of Chittarandas Dass, the walking encyclopaedia on Indian motor transport arena. It is not out of place here to confess that I have come under the spell of this master-teacher six months ago to assimilate the essence of Indian road transport industry.
His argument at the lecture at the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport (Delhi Chapter), of which he is a Fellow as well, was concise and clear. Railways and road transport are complementary to each other and not “competitors”. But his grouse is that railways always feel that its share is being taken away by road transport. This antipathy towards road transport is nothing recent. Actually it dates back to pre-Independent India. Until 1920s, there were no motorized transport in India. Between 1913 and 1945 (World War II), Britishers brought in approximately 43,000 vehicles for army use. When they disposed off these vehicles, this led to the private road transport in this country.
The British government owned railways became “apprehensive” as passenger-cum-goods transport owned by natives began to become popular and expectedly sought protection. Inevitably, the British government sided with railways leading to private road transporters mobilising. Even national leaders made common cause with road transporters, pointed out Dass. This in a way led to the passage of maiden legislation viz., the Motor Vehicles Act 1939. Strangely, post-Independence also witnessed the same step-motherly treatment at the hands of our own “national leaders” – siding with Railways.
Government data reveals that in 1950-51, around the time India’s first Five Year Plan was unfolded, railways enjoyed 66% share of cargo transport vis-à-vis road’s share of 14%. After touching a high of 84% in 1960-61, railways began to lose and road began its upward climb – never ever to be halted, come what may. Around the time, Dr Manmohan Singh, the present Prime Minister and the then Finance Minister in the late Narasimha Rao government , unleashed the new economic era (1990-91), the inflection point happened. Over the next decade (1999-2000), railways share slided to 39% and road’s moved to 61%. This has not changed much since then.
Listening to Dass’s dissertation led me to muse: what, if British were not to have introduced rail transport in India? A pertinent question, no doubt. Well, I was not the only one to give room for such a thought. Digging through global highways construction saga, I ran into an essay on “Highway Construction in Massachussetts” written by Charles Livy Mettle, a Mechanical Engineer, in 1897. Remember the year was 1897! What’s his thought process? “Before the railroad was devised, public roads that possessed any claim to excellence were limited to the most populous states bordering the Atlantic coast. It is without doubt true that, had not transportation by rail been invented until the present time, the public roads of this country would be in a far more satisfactory condition than we find them today. With the advent of the locomotive came the withdrawal of active interest in the character of our highways.” Sounds familiar, no?
From time to time, we keep hearing about this “modal split” of rail versus road. The Working Group Report on the Road Transport for the Eleventh Five Year Plan – of which Dass was a member among others, states that “Several of the factors leading to the relative high growth in road transport are structural. These include more dispersed industrial and business location patterns and increased need for just in time deliveries. Second, the sector is composed of many small private operators in a highly competitive and dynamic environment. Structurally, railways are confronted with the changing pattern of industrial production and geography away from traditional industries and clusters towards a more dispersed pattern embodying high value and low volume manufactures. This coupled with complex technical, administrative working practices, service quality and inability to respond to changing market conditions have led to erosion in the market share of railways in freight in particular from more than four fifth in 1950-51 to less than two-fifth as of now.”
We are at the fag end of Eleventh Plan. What kind of projection of freight movement this Working Group made when it prepared its report? “The elasticity of tonne kilometres by road transport with respect to GDP is found to be a little above unity (1.1). Using an elasticity of 1.1 of BTKM (Billion Tonne Kilometres) with respect to GDP, four alternative scenarios for BTKM over the Eleventh Five Year Plan have been projected, for alternative GDP growth rates of 7, 8, 8.5 and 9 per cent as given in the Approach Paper to Eleventh Plan. In 2006-7, it postulated 768 BTKMs on the basis of Tenth Plan assumption of 8% growth. Assuming the same 8% GDP growth – which incidentally happens to be the close to the ground, the respective BTKMs for 2009-10 and 2010-11 were believed to be 989 and 1,076. The relevant estimate for 2011-12 – the current financial year and the last year of Eleventh Year – is 1,171 BTKMs.
I would not be surprised if these estimates were surpassed, given the innate nature of statistical data. Simply put, let us end this needless rail versus road debate. “It is a provider of vital initial and last mile connectivity to all other modes of transport,” is how Dass summed it up. Well said, Mr Dass!
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