Today's Cancelled Trains
New Delhi: Facing repeated complaints by passengers, the prime minister’s office has pulled up the Railway ministry. According to sources, the PMO has come hard on Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu over his failure in ensuring punctuality of trains.
Sources say that the complaints received by the PMO were being forwarded to the railway ministry on a regular basis from teh past few days and last week, the PMO called Prabhu and told him to follow the same pattern as was followed during emergency when the trains were on time.
After the PMO’s intervention, the traffic officials are said to have dug out parliamentary speeches and records of the emergency to find out whether trains at that time were actually on time or was it merely a myth.
However, quickly reacting to the report, the Railway Ministry has clarified on PMO’s intervention. “It’s my duty to ensure regular monitoring of punctuality of trains. Slackness in the system has to be corrected. Our trains are running on time than they were ten days back. It shouldn’t be linked to any order from the PMO,” Member Traffic Ajay Shukla said.
“We’ve been told that trains ran on time during the Emergency. We are taking out old files from that time to study the patterns of train punctuality. Old records show trains did maintain punctuality of upwards of 90 per cent back then,” said a senior ministry official on condition of anonymity. This, sources said, comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi sought an explanation from Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu recently on why trains were running late and punctuality figures were on the decline. Railway officials were also told that the PMO has been receiving frequent complaints from MPs, ministers and citizens about trains running way behind schedule. The complaints were being forwarded to the ministry, and many of them mentioned how punctual trains were during the Emergency.
Since then, Prabhu is learnt to be taking stock of punctuality figures and asset-failure on a daily basis — a first for a Railway Minister in recent years.
The veil over punctuality figures was lifted earlier this month after Railway Board Member (Traffic) Ajay Shukla, in a letter to all zonal railways, warned traffic officers of “wrong reporting” of the figures, which can be done by manually feeding incorrect information about the movement of trains in the central coaching operations information system. This is virtually the same as admitting that figures were being fudged all these years. The punishment for it, the letter says, will be suspension and inter-zonal transfer and other disciplinary action against officers as high as the zonal chief passenger traffic officer.
Since then, the punctuality figures have plummeted which, Rail Bhawan officials believe, is a sign of a decrease in the apparent fudging of punctuality data. While 84.43 per cent punctuality was maintained in March 2014, the figure for the same month now stands at 79 per cent on a nationwide basis. Zonal railways like the Northern Railway saw its punctuality figures come down from 82 per cent to 60 per cent. The figures are expected to drop further in the coming days.
Under fire, the traffic directorate, whose job is to run trains efficiently, has said that asset/equipment failure — like signal malfunction, rolling stock breakdown, overhead equipment failure, etc — contributes a lot to “punctuality loss”, but not all such instances are accurately reported by their engineering counterparts. “The extent of asset failure causing punctuality loss was being hidden behind rosy punctuality data all these years. That will now come to the fore now,” said an official.
A few years ago, trials of ‘data logger’, a system installed by the signalling and telecom branch of the Railways to automatically log running status of trains, were held successfully, but it was never rolled out across India as the traffic directorate voiced cost concerns. Currently, it is active at a few places along High Density Routes like Mughalsarai.
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