The Indian Railways has announced that it achieved 100 per cent punctuality of its passenger trains on July 1, a never-before feat.

Try this question:

Q.Discuss various issues crippling the punctuality of the Indian Railways.

Usually, the Indian Railways run over 13,000 passenger trains and over 8,000 freight trains every day.
It is important to remember the context – very few trains are running now, and the punctuality of the Railways can hardly be compared with its own performance on this count in pre-COVID times.
The 100 per cent punctuality has been achieved when the network is running just 230 passenger trains – along with about 3,000 loaded freight trains and 2,200 empty ones.
This is no mean achievement – it is indeed not an easy task given all the constraints that the Railways usually face while running a train on its designated path and time slot.

There are a number of reasons, which is also why the achievement of the Railways is significant.
There are unforeseen situations such as a failure of assets like the signalling system and overhead power equipment.
Several types of breakdowns can occur, related to rolling stock, tracks, etc., that make a train lose time along the way.
Then there are external unforeseen problems like run-over cattle and humans, agitations on the tracks, and the like.

The maintenance of tracks was carried out in a quick time during the COVID period in various critical sections, so the average speed increased, and stretches of slowing down were minimized.
Better and modern signalling is also making an impact.
Another reason is better planning and operations analysis.

In normal times, these failures take away a lot of scheduled time when the train is detained even for a short time because making up the lost time during the remainder of the journey is a tricky business.
It’s not as though a train can just run faster to make up for a lost time. In a network chock-a-block with trains, a train hardly ever has such leeway built into its pre-set path.
Any train that gets delayed inordinately due to whatever reason during the journey theoretically eats into the “path” – or time slot allotted on the track – of another train.
It then becomes a matter of which train to prioritise. Conventionally, Rajdhanis and premium trains get priority of path over ordinary mail/express trains.
Freight trains, whose runs are not exactly time-sensitive, are usually held up to make way for passenger trains.

It’s a constantly dynamic scenario in which railway operations professionals take calls all the time.
At the heart of the problem are network capacity constraints. It basically means that there are more trains than the network can handle in a given time bracket.
Around 60 per cent of all train traffic is on the Golden Quadrilateral, even though it represents just about 15 per cent of the total network.
There are projects to enhance capacity by building additional lines and modernizing signalling systems, etc.

The Railways are working on what is called a “zero-based timetable”.
In this concept, which is to be introduced soon, every train that enters the network is justified based on needs and costs.
It is expected to make train operations more seamless.

What did it take for the Indian Railways to achieve 100% punctuality?

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