Editorial
Pull up the railway from morass
A suggested action plan to revitalise it
JUST how neglected the Bangladesh Railway (BR) has been since the country's independence is driven home by some eye-opening statistics cited at a roundtable recently. Not only has it lost over 40 percent of its land resource to illegal occupation, the size of its inventory with which it had originally begun in 1971 has also shrunk terribly over time. Whereas the BR had 500 locomotives and 16,100 wagons in 1972, the figures have plummeted to 285 and 9,473 as of now. Not only that, the number of railway employees has also fallen and the railway tracks, sleepers and signalling equipment are antiquated, to say the least.
All of this is supremely ironical when one takes into account the fact that 5.38 crore commuters used the railway in the last fiscal. Despite the decrepit state the BR has been pushed into by successive governments and the rapid expansion of road transportation, the railway even in a shambles gets used annually by more than one-third of the country's population. This itself is a measure of its still unrealised potential as bulk carrier of passengers and goods.
The chief merits of railway transportation, both passenger and goods, are that it is cheaper and safer compared with travel by road and waterways. This also happens to be a mode very popular with tourists elsewhere in the world.
There is a three-point suggestion we would like to advance for the development of the railway with the hope that the government will give it due consideration, early in its tenure. The recipe we are providing may not necessarily entail a large injection of funds into the sector. First and foremost, the government must help the railway reclaim 40 percent of the land it has lost to a wide variety of expropriators. This would open an avenue for the railway to make profitable use of the land thereby generating revenues for modernisation and expansion purposes. Secondly, the Bangladesh Railway should be helped by the government to recover the accumulated sum of Tk 12,000 crore that different organisations owe to BR in unpaid freight bills. So, the bankruptcy of the railway is not all of its own making, to a large extent, it's the handiwork of various other organisations.
Our final point relates to policy-making. For all intents and purposes, we have treated road, railway and waterway in straight jackets and not as mutually reinforcing components of a multi-modal transportation system. It is time we did that and gave the railway its due.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments