Productivity of Railways - Inputs on Solutions

Dear Friends,

Below are the Key Root Causes and Issues on Productivity of Railways as highlighted by you.

Please help identify Solutions that will help improve the Productivity of Railways.

Please be as specific as you can. We will then compile the whitepaper and share it with the Railway Minister and the Ministry for actions.

Look forward to your participation!
Rajendra Pratap Gupta

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Productivity of Railways – Root Causes
1. Railways is over staffed
2. Majority of the cleanliness work in not automated and requires manual labour
3. Cleaning staff is inefficient and untrained
4. Accountability of the railway staff is nil
5. Railways is a cheap mode of travel and hence the demand for tickets is very high
6. Number of people who visit the station is huge
7. A large population does not have internet access and hence queues up at the station counters to buy tickets
8. Safety and security at the stations is not given priority
9. Security personnel are not trained enough to handle the crowd rush
10. Acquiring land for building new tracks is a time consuming process
11. India has never been a country which believes in phasing out certain things. Hence, old and inefficient things (like old AC coaches) are still in use
12. Railways lack modern communication equipment
13. Factors like single tracks, bad condition of tracks, low average running speed etc. makes the trains run behind time
14. Lack of E Signalling causes delay in the running of trains
15. Certain section of railway employees have been used to getting bribes for getting work done on priority
16. The process design is outdated and inefficient
17. New routes are selected based on political agendas and not based on actual need
18. Lack of leadership at different levels
19. Big communication gap between different levels of employees
20. Bad handling of goods by porters is a major cause of low goods booking


Productivity of Railways – Issues
1. Too many people involved in cleaning the toilet waste
2. Bad governance/management of facility
3. Non availability of tickets when one wants to travel
4. Too much time wasted in buying tickets
5. Lack-lustre security and security personnel
6. A lot of areas still have single tracks
7. Old AC coaches used in Shatabdi Express’ which are not very energy efficient
8. Limited line capacity for goods train
9. Trains usually do not run on time schedules
10. Expectation of bribes
11. The turn-around time of passenger as well as goods trains is much lower resulting in far lower utilization of its assets
12. The manual cleaning, checking and regular maintenance and loading/unloading operations take longer time
13. FDI not allowed in this sector
14. Private players not allowed
15. Inefficient use of the quota allotted
16. Crowd management on railway stations and inside the trains is bad
17. Cleanliness staff is inefficient
18. The engines of the trains are inefficient and consume a lot of fuel
19. Inefficient use of the railway land
20. The selection of new train routes is illogical more