"Tatkal" Railway Bookings

It is amazing how the Indian railway reservation system has evolved over the last two decades.

Today I tried my hand, for the first time, at a system called "Tatkal". It is a system for last-minute bookings, for travelers who have not planned their journey in advance. The computerized system turned out to be a lot easier than expected.

I needed to make a quick trip to Mumbai, which is about 1400 km from New Delhi. There are about 20 trains connecting the two cities, giving you a wide range of options. You could start your journey at midnight, or take the last train after 11:00PM. You could cover the distance in 15.15 hrs in the fastest train, the Rajdhani Express (no. 12952), in 1st class AC comfort, for INR 4755, or reach there at a more leisurely pace in the Amritsar Express (no. 11058), which takes no less double the time - 31.15 hrs. A journey on the latter, on a 'sleeper' ticket would cost you just INR 600 (USD 9.30!).

You also realize that in the egalitarian world of Indian Railways, even the slowest train is called an "Express" :)

My travel priorities were quite straightforward:I did not want to start my journey at unearthly hours, and I waned to travel cheap. This brought down my choices to five trains, all of which were fully booked. So I opted to go for "Tatkal" which is a option that sits discreetly as a narrow banner, alongside the others: General / Ladies / Handicapped.

The first option was Paschim Express (22 hrs) and it showed 17 seats available when I logged in at 11:00AM. However, by the time I reached the payments page, the IRCTC website went into its 'daily maintenance' mode. When I returned an hour later, all the seats were gone!  The next best option seemed to be the 12284 'Nzm Ers Duronto' (20 hrs), and this too was running on a waiting list.

Now, a surprising thing happened when I opted to take a wait-listed ticket. The IRCTC servers now gave me a pop-up "Vikalp" option - in case this ticket was not confirmed, I had three other trains to choose from, all of which were the next available trains to Mumbai. This saved me the trouble of going back, retracing all the steps to make an alternate booking. Cool.

The ease with which the whole process was completed reminded me of the late 1990s when the only option was to line up at the railway reservation counters. You had to reach the station two months in advance, stand in a long line, and wait for your turn at the counter. There had been times when the bookings closed by the time I reached the window, or was shortchanged by the ticketing officers. Either way, you lost at least half a day for rail bookings.

Now, thanks to IRCTC, the online booking system has become amazingly simple. So much so that it is easy to forget that it represents just a small fraction of the effort put in by a government agency, CRIS (Centre for Railway Info Systems), to help railways carry 6 billion passengers, and 6 million tons of freight, every year!

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Scope for Improvement:

* Acronyms are confusing - it would be useful to have the full-form appear on a mouse-over. Eg. Train no. 12172 s described as "HW LTT AC SF", which is no better than Morse-code. Turns out that this is "Haridwar Lokmanya Tilak Terminus Air-Conditioned Super Fast Express"!

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LINKS:

* VIKALP Scheme - http://contents.irctc.co.in/en/vikalpTerms.html

* Raghuram (2007): Turnaround of the Indian Railways - http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2007-02-03graghuram.pdf

* Tatkal Booking Guide - http://contents.irctc.co.in/en/TatkalBooking.html

Indian Infra: Untold Stories, Lost Lessons

I always do a double-take whenever I spot an article or new item on the Delhi-Mumbai Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC).  Call it nostalgia, or just plain curiosity that comes from close association a few years ago.

I was working with JICA in the 2000s when this project was conceived, and when the proposal passed through the labyrinth of North Block before being taken up by the Japanese government. As a part of the numerous surveys and site visits that resulted in the master-plan, I worked with various consultants and traveled extensively - especially in Maharashtra and Gujarat.

One thing that had always puzzled me was the insistence from Indian Railways that the dedicated freight line be "double stack" and "electrical traction". This meant that the engineers and planners had to work on Star Trek mode - to 'go where no man had gone before'. Such a combination had never been implemented successfully anywhere. Getting the electrified pantographs over and above the height of double-stacked containers, and then to get these trains to run reasonably fast across the baked scrublands of Rajasthan, seemed particularly difficult.

Another clear challenge was to get the freight lines through the super densely populated areas of Mumbai, to the JNPT Port.

After 2009, I had lost touch with this project since not much was coming into the public domain by way of news. I did read that the Japanese had - very strategically - limited their ODA involvement to the Western Corridor, and that too from Rewari to Vadodara, instead of going all the way till Mumbai. The Eastern Corridor was subsequently taken up by the World Bank.

Cut to 27 Feb., 2017, to a symposium organised the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) and the Embassy of Japan on "Quality Infrastructure: Japanese Investment in India". At this event, I was quite surprised to hear Mr. Amitabh Kant (now CEO, NITI Aayog) say that five new cities would be commissioned by 2018, along the DFC.

Was this my own Rip Van Winkle moment? What had I missed? Was the Industrial Corridor coming up faster than the freight corridor that supported it? How was this great development being ignored by our hyperactive media?

A subsequent presentation confirmed a long-held opinion that the focus of the Indian media remains firmly on negative reporting. Good news is no news.

Mr. Anil Kumar Dutta (MD, DFC 2014-15) spoke of the close coordination with state government that had resulted in smooth transfer of land to DFC. He talked of 'bombshells' that had been defused during his tenure. One had come from the environment ministry (MoEF) demanding that the route alignment be shifted 140km to save the Balaram Ambaji Wildlife Sanctuary on the Gujarat-Rajasthan border. Another one from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) that had objected to the use of a piece of land in the Rewari for the main rail-yard because it had traces of a Harappan settlement dating back to 3000+ years.

Contrary to popular notions about both MoEF and ASI, Mr. Dutta declared that they were "most cooperative...all you must do is to listen - and take action - on their concerns!"

In the case of the suspected Harappan settlement, the discussions had yielded a time-bound, pragmatic solution. DFC hired the services of IIT Kanpur and had the whole rail-yard zone scanned with special ground penetrating radars. A small portion was found to contain ancient remains and  ASI had agreed to go as deep as required to extract all the material it needed. Once this was done, all the clearances were promptly given.

This symposium had quite a number of takeaways. Clearly, we seem to be hiring the right people for the right jobs and they seem to be doing great work, far away from the glare of the Indian media.

Unfortunately, it is also clear that we continue to be pathetic when it comes to documenting lessons learnt from mega projects like the Dedicated Freight Corridor. Great lessons learnt by JICA, DFC and DFCCIL remain locked in project reports, and in the minds of the pragmatic people who cut the proverbial Gordian knot, and then moved on nonchalantly to the next task at hand, or just faded into retirement.

If the lessons we learn are not shared in the public domain, the task of pioneers in other sectors are bound to become so much more difficult.

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LINKS & REFERENCES

* DFCCIL - http://dfccil.gov.in/dfccil_app/Home
* Axis Capital PPT (Jan., 2016) - http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/Railways%20report%20-%208%20Jan%202016.pdf
* Balaram Ambaji Wildlife Sanctuary - https://forests.gujarat.gov.in/balaram-sanctuary.htm
* (2012) - http://www.financialexpress.com/archive/environmental-issues-may-delay-rail-freight-corridors/1030135/
* (2013) - DFCCIL PPT by R.K. Gupta -- http://www.i-cema.in/past_event/DFCC-Project-Status-Opportunities.pdf
* Nippon Koei India - http://www.nkindia.in/transportation.html

`Rail Technology Digest`

.
In 2010, six years after Japan`s Kawasaki Heavy Industries won its first order for supplying high-speed trains to China, a new world record was announced. A  train called CRH380A clocked 420 km/h (262mph).

`CRH` stands for China Railways High-speed and their officials were quoted saying that all the technology, design and equipment for this train had been created in China.

The Japanese、of course, were livid. To them, the CRH series was just a modified version of JR East`s E2-1000 series, but the Chinese were now saying that the technology had been `digested` and that the new trains are fully indigenous.

Deja vu?

This may be exactly how the Americans & British reacted when they saw  the first Japanese three -cylinder steam-engines. In the 1920s Japan had imported some engines from ALCO (built under license from LNER, UK). These were called Class-8200 or  C52, and some of them were completely dismantled and reverse-engineered into a `new`, `improved` model called the C-53. By 1934, Japanese Imperial Railways in Manchuria - the Mantetsu - inaugurated the "Asia Express", a high speed train from Dalian to the Manchukuo capital of Hsinking. This train had a top speed of 134 km/h (83 mph), and was the fastest scheduled train in Asia at the time.

More recently, Siemens too reacted the same way when they saw the first `GreenMover Max` 100% low-floor light transit vehicles (LF-LRVs) in Japan. In 1998, they had supplied Hiroshima city with their Combino-series, which was, at the time, one of the most advanced tram systems. By 2006 a consortium of Japanese manufacturers (J-Tram) came up with the GreenMover Max. The technology had by now been fully `digested`.

When it comes to international technology transfers, I guess it helps to have a good `digestion` :-)  

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REFERENCES:

Kawasaki Wins High-Speed Train Order for China, KHI News, 20 Oct., 2004
http://www.khi.co.jp/english/news/detail/ba041020.html

How Japan Profits From China's Plans, Forbes, 26 Oct 2009 - http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/26/china-japan-bullet-train-business-logistics-high-speed-rail.html

Bullets and Trains: Exporting Japan’s Shinkansen to China and Taiwan, Christopher P. Hood in Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, 1 March 2007.
http://www.japanfocus.org/-Christopher%20P.-Hood/2367 

Discussion on CRH Specs - Railroad.net - http://www.railroad.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=137&t=72195

262mph train sets speed record in China: China celebrates the new ultrafast CRH380 train. TechRadar.com, 26 Oct., 2010. http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/262mph-train-sets-speed-record-in-china-903547

Discussion - CRH380 - http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=1222409&page=14

The Japanese C53 Steam Engine - http://homepage3.nifty.com/EF57/engines/C53.htm

Overview of Japan`s Modern Steam Locomotives - Saito Akira - http://krc.gr.jp/library/jpmodernsl/jpmodernsl.pdf

More Details: http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/262mph-train-sets-speed-record-in-china-903547#ixzz16HwNy5Fr

Nigel Gresley - First 3-cylinder steam engines