Pakistan Railways: ‘A Tale from Perfection to Decline’

Which machine or invention has changed the world the fastest and most profoundly in the shortest amount of time? Television? Radio? Airplanes, computers, mobile phones? Internet? All these are important in their place but as far as changing the world in a few years is concerned, all these inventions are water in front of railways.

When the railway system started coming to the subcontinent 169 years ago, it was not only a means of transportation, it changed the way people live, eat, drink, wear, work or do business and even think within a few decades. Changed the style too.

But this system in Pakistan today has become an instructive story of disintegration and decline in Pakistan. Talk about the beginning and perfection a little later, but first listen to the story of the present and the decline.

Official claims are correct, but the actual conditions of railways in Pakistan can be gauged by going to the ground. Today, instead of expanding, railways in Pakistan are shrinking.

According to a research paper by Engineer Abdul Aziz, the total length of our railway line at the time of independence was more than 8561 km, now it has reduced to a little more than 7791 km, and the lines have been closed at many places.

Rusty railway line of Lindi Kotal

The most dramatic example of this is Lindi Kotal. This railway line was built by the British at a cost of 50 thousand pounds per mile, which was the most expensive railway line not only in India but also in the world, because at that time, rails were usually laid for 5 to 10 thousand pounds per mile. was

What is the status of this most expensive project today, says Landi Kotal Met Jamedar Khalid Khan, ‘The last train came here in 2007. There was a flood in 2007 which washed away the tracks.

Railway officers come here again and again and survey the place. They assure us that we are restoring the rail, but no action has been taken. It has been 15 years that the rail has not come here.’

But the surprising thing is that despite the lack of rail, 27 people are deployed from Landi Kotal to Peshawar to protect the tracks, who are performing day and night duty.’

However, we saw that tracks are missing in many places despite day and night duty. Lindi Kotal and beyond to Machni tell an eerie tale of broken sleepers, broken tracks, and decaying tunnels, and in some places even goat pens built inside the rail tunnels.

It may have been a decline, but there was a time when railways were not just the norm but the rule. It is said that India was not actually conquered by the British army but truly by the railways.

Who is pulling the engine?

When and how did this railway reach India and how did the British think of it?

Around 1860, the citizens of Karachi saw a strange scene that blew their minds. Engineer John Brenton described the incident as follows:

‘The citizens of Sindh had never seen a railway engine. They had heard rumors that this engine pulled heavy loads with the help of some unseen force beyond their understanding.

They were scared to see that some demonic force might be pushing the engine. When I started driving the engine, the citizens of Karachi were shocked to see it.

I was driving the engine slowly. A crowd of people gathered around. I was afraid that there might be an accident so I blew the steam whistle loudly to scare them. They fell over each other and ran away.’

But the railway had already started in Bombay even before Karachi. The world’s first railway ran in England in 1825, followed by talk of running a train in India in the 1840s.

Why was the East India Company against running railways in India?

Interestingly, the East India Company was initially against the running of railways in India. He believed that because there was a caste system and upper castes would never travel with lower castes, there were frequent floods and storms, there were many dangerous wild animals, skilled engineers and experience. Where will the car contractors come from, etc. etc., so rail can never succeed here.

But the people who were in favor of running the railway were so powerful that the East India Company eventually had to kneel unwillingly.

The most powerful of these people were the cotton merchants, who wanted to pick up the crop from the markets here and deliver it to the textile factories in England. So on April 16, 1853, when the train left Bombay for Thana, it was not only India but Asia. It was also the first train.

Sahib Sultan of Sindh

The incident of the first running of this train is very interesting, the engine of which was named ‘Saheb Sindh Sultan’. People had never seen anything like this before. If there is no horse, oxen or elephant pulling ‘Sahib Sindh Sultan’, how is it going?

Surely there are ghosts pushing the coal-spewing, smoky, black engine.

A rumor that spread even faster than the railroad was that the whites would capture small children and bury them under the railroad tracks, and through this black magic the engine would be powered.

Changed the history of rail

When the railway reached India, it changed the history of India within a few years. As we mentioned at the beginning, no other invention or machine has changed the world as fast as the rail. how does?

Suppose you go to Calcutta in 1840, and you are not a Raja Maharaja but a common man. Forget it. For this journey of two and a half thousand miles you will need many lives.

In those days, the common means of travel was the bullock cart. The speed of a bullock cart is about three kilometers per hour, which is slower than walking. Then there are the problems of dirt roads, mud, dust, potholes, rain, storms, thieves, disease, famine and hunger. Trouble is different. After every twenty-five kilometers, the cost of spending the night in the inn is separate.

Then the biggest thorn is that there are dozens of small rivers and hundreds of streams along the way. How can a bullock cart or a horse cross the Indus, Ganges or Brahmaputra?

Let me remind you that before railways in India there was no bridge over any river, all bridges were built for railways. Road bridges were built sixty-seven years after railways. These bridges united the scattered pieces of the country like glue.

The fight that gave India a pro against each other

Before rail, every region of India was like an island. A common man did not go more than ten or fifteen miles from his native place, nor did he need to. Jobs, relationships were also done in nearby areas.

Almost everything of daily need was produced locally from local ingredients. Only the royal family or the nobles and nawabs were allowed to use goods brought from distant regions.

Railways came and overturned this whole system. Railway tracks were not just pieces of iron, but the thread that held all of India together.

For the first time in history, it became possible for a person to travel from Lindi Kotal to Karachi, from Karachi to Bombay, from Bombay to Madras and from there to Calcutta within a week and ten days.

Now it is common for a tribal from Lindi Kotal to get a job in Bombay, a Karachiite in Calcutta and a Dhaka resident in Quetta, which was unimaginable a few years ago. Raza Ali Abidi writes in his book ‘Rail Kahani’ that ‘ever since the railway started, people have started marrying off their daughters far and wide.’

Today, if we see the goods lying in a shop in a remote village, then it has reached here not only from the country but also from all corners of the world. This process was initiated by the railways.

When travel became easy, the goods produced in one region also began to reach other regions easily. This also reduced the prices of goods.

Now goods not only from other regions but from other countries became available to the ports and from there by rail to the corners of the country, and the goods from here began to go to other countries, but this is mentioned a little later.

Time

Apart from this, the concept of standard time was also given by Rail. Before the railroad, each region had its own time, and no one bothered to match it with other parts of the country, nor did it need to. If it is eight o’clock in the morning in Lahore, what difference does it make if it is eight o’clock in Madras at that time? The bullock cart will reach there after months.

When the train came, it also brought the timetable. For rail efficiency, it was essential that the time everywhere be the same in order to adhere to the rail schedule, otherwise if each city’s time was off by even a few minutes, the entire rail system would grind to a halt. This is where Standard Time came from.

Consumerism

Moreover, consumerism was also promoted by railways. After the rail started, the products reached every corner of India. Soap, biscuits, cigarettes, and dozens of other products reached every store in the country.

Now what you would find in a shop in Dhaka, you could buy the same thing in Chaman on the border of Iran. This was unimaginable a few years ago.

Postage

A postal system existed before, but very slow and unreliable, it was also replaced by rail. If there was no rail, it would not have been possible for Ghalib to correspond with about a thousand people and today we would be largely deprived of Ghalib’s heartwarming prose writings.

In this way, rail can be described as a more dangerous invention than television, radio, telephone, computer or the Internet.

Another reason is that television or internet etc. did not have as immediate and far-reaching impact as rail.

Rail also helped in India’s independence

This is the reason why not only the movement of goods and people, but also the transmission of ideas and ideas became very easy due to the easy access of mail, newspapers, magazines and books across the country.

It would not be wrong to say that if there were no railways, it would have taken a long time for India’s freedom movement to succeed.

It is a matter of later, but when the railways came, a wave of restlessness spread among the educated class of India. They began to see that what the British army could not do, it would do.

Renowned critic and intellectual Nasir Abbas Nair says that ‘Railways have a romance and nostalgia attached to them, and are regarded as one of the blessings of British rule.

The black railway engine was the greatest manifestation of the power of the white masters and when this engine was running, the viewers saw it combined with the political, military and technological power of the British.’

He further said that ‘Railways not only changed the land map of India but also changed the mental map. We rank him among the benefactors of the British but ignore his dark side.’

Where will the engine take us?

This dark side may have been hidden from the eyes of others, but it could not escape from the sharp satirical poetry of the Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi as he pointed out the destructive effects of the railways on the civilization of India, and its original mission at the very beginning. Realized:

What is the religion of the engine ahead / What is the bean in front of the buffalo?

Sixth us exactly where the next way/where will the engine pull us

They say that we do not need our youth/Khidr in the path of progress as far as the rail is concerned

It has sweat and it has steam / Europe has put Asia on the engine

Direct financial benefit to the UK

The British gave contracts to several British companies to keep India on the engine. A trick was to make these companies vulnerable to the fear of loss.

No matter how much the company ran into losses, five percent of the profit was pocketed by the Indians. In this way millions of pounds started flowing out of India and filling the coffers of the British in the name of railways.

Since there was no risk of loss, these companies lavished money.

Shashi Tharoor writes in his book that the same companies that used to lay a railway line in Australia or Canada for 2,000 pounds per mile, in India, the same companies spent 18,000 pounds for laying a mile of track.

Fear of Russia

Beyond that, there was another reason behind the laying of the rail network. And that was military necessity. The War of Independence of 1857 further intensified the need for rail.

Because of the railway, the British did not need to keep a large number of troops in each region, because if there was a rebellion in one province of the country, the army could reach there within a few hours from another province.

Now take the same Lindi Kotal. There was no economic benefit to bringing rail here because there was nothing that needed to be transported to other areas. Nor was there a large population here.

The real problem was Afghanistan behind the mountains near Lindi Kotal. Around the same time that the British started planning to introduce railways to India, Russia was also actively involved in laying tracks in Central Asia.

In 1889, Russia had reached Maru city, only 250 km from the Afghan border. The British were threatened that Russia might not advance and attack India through Afghanistan.

Therefore, they also connected this remote and very difficult area with rail so that if there is an attack from Afghanistan, it can be defended with the help of rail.

It is for this reason that the British built many train stations in the form of battle forts, in which rosens were left to man the machine guns. Lahore train station is a good example of this.

Billions of journeys

Whatever apprehensions the East India Company may have had, the railways in India ran in such a way that all apprehensions and speculations were dashed.

The success of railways in India can be gauged from the fact that in 1905 twenty million passengers traveled by rail, and in 1946 the same number increased to over one billion.

Don’t think that one billion people traveled by rail in 1946 because the total population of India was 36 crores at that time.

It’s actually about the number of tickets that people bought this year. In other words, Little India made one billion trips in 1946. Was it even possible to imagine a hundred years ago?

If there were no British, there would be no railway in India?

Many people even today believe that the railways were a priceless gift of the British to India. For example, if India was ruled by the Mughals, would India never have had a railway?

It is completely baseless that India was given a gift by the British in the form of railways. China, Iran, Russia and hundreds of other countries were never occupied by the British, but they also established railway systems.

It was actually the private commercial companies that laid the railway tracks and ran the engines on them and completed all the related accessories.

Whoever gave them money, they would make it a system. It does not require possession.

Just like today you don’t need to conquer a country to lay a mobile network but you need to give contracts to companies, same was the case with railways.’

Why is the railway declining in Pakistan?

In Pakistan, 70 million people traveled by rail in 2019, which is 31 percent of the total population, while in India, five billion people travel in a year, which is 400 percent of the total population. In other words, taking out the difference in population, rail travel is done 12 times more in India than in Pakistan.

Today, while petrol prices are skyrocketing, roads are becoming more and more crowded, rail is still the cheapest, most comfortable and safest mode of travel in the world. So why is Pakistan neglecting the railways?

The former Auditor General of Pakistan Railways, Shiraz Haider, answered this question as follows: “Various reasons are given that the truck mafia deliberately failed the railway, etc., but the main reason is that in the 90s, the governments The priorities shifted away from railways towards motorways and express highways.

Trillions of rupees were invested in roads, but railways were neglected like an orphan. This is the most important and the biggest reason for his plight.

So today it is 169 years of railways in the subcontinent of India and Pakistan. During this time he saw many ups and downs.

There is no doubt that the British laid the railway for their own interest, but the ultimate benefit came to the people of the subcontinent.

Today it is up to the governments of these countries how much they promote this heritage or leave it to rot and decay.