On the first look, India has a lot of trouble with traffic accidents. The roads are crowed and many accidents take place. Because the problem is so big, it make sense to think about how to overcome the issue. A deeper look into India's traffic situation shows, that all sorts of transportation is used on daily basis: bicycles, private owned cars, trucks and of course the railroad. India has not only crowed cities, but it owns the second largest railroad network in the world. How can it be, that the basic logistics problems remains unsolved?
From complex problems it is known, that it is to simple to argue, that more investment are necessary, because the money is not available. Instead the question has to do with the right priorities. That means, a fixed amount of resources has to distributed to different places. And the question is, what is the perfect investment in logistics.
Before we can answer the issue, a short look into the statistics make sense. Unfortunately, only worldwide numbers are available. The amount of worldwide cars is 1.3 billion, while the amount of locomotives is only 65000. Most of the locomotives are located in U.S., U.K,, Germany and France. The amount of locomotives in India is very little. But why is the total number of cars so big, while the number of locomotives is so little? Sure, a locomotive costs more than a car, but if we measure the vehicles with a pricetag the current investment in private cars is 50x bigger than for locomotives. And exactly this is the problem. The relationship between cars and locomotives is wrong.
What the world in general, and India in detail has to do, is to invest more money into locomotives, and reduce the investment in cars. This will solve the transportation problem. The reason is, that a locomotive has a better cost to profit margin than any other transport vehicle. The railroad nees less energy, can transport more freight and needs less human manpower than cars. Surprisingly, most countries including India are living in the luxury situation to ignore the railroad and invest the available resources into cars.
From an abstract point of view, the logistics problem of a countries follows the same rule like a computer game. The computer has to deal with limited ressources, the amount of money he can spend is restricted and he has to decide, if he likes to buy 1 locomotive or 400 new cars. If the invests the money in the wrong ratio he will loose the game. Loosing means, that a countries is not able to transport all the freight to the destination and too many accidents take place.
In a pdf paper the exact number of locomotives in India are given.[1] According to page 3 the total number is 11461. 50% of them are Diesel engines, and 50% are electric driven. In comparison to the population this number is very small, and according to the amount of cars in India this is also small. That means, the railroad has in India (like in many countries in the world) an extraordinary low priority. In contrast, all the money is put into private owned cars. Does this make sense? No it doesn't and as a result, many problems can be observed in reality.
Now we can imagine what will happen, if some of the locomotives need repair. This situation is common for all technical machines and as result the amount of available locomotives will become much smaller. Are the reamaining locomotives able to transport passangers and freight in a large countries like India? No they don't. That means, the capacity is too low.
India is not the only country who gave the train fleet a low priority. It is bit difficult to get exact numbers but according to Google the total amount of trains in China is only 21000. The problem with the chinese railroad network is known. In the 1980s they have invested nearly nothing into the railroads, and since then the situation doesn't changed that much. Today, the railroad system in China has a low priority, while private owned car have become the top priority. According to the latest statistics, China has around 250 million cars. Perhaps it make sense to compare the priorities according to financial aspects.
- 21000 locomotives, each costs 10 million US$ = 210 billion US$
- 250 million cars, each costs 25000 US$ = 6250 billion US$
- the relationship is 1:30, which means from 100 US$ in total only 3 US$ are spend for the railroad, while the rest is invested into car-based transportation
Solving the crisis
... has to do with adjusting the priorities. There is no need to spend more money into transportation but modify the priorities into the direction of a railroad. The question which has to be answered is, how many US$ from 100 US$ in total should be spend for locomotives and how many for cars. The current situation is, that the railroad gets nothing, and all the money which is 97% goes into cars.
[1] INDIAN RAILWAYS, FACTS & FIGURES 2016-17, http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/railwayboard/uploads/directorate/stat_econ/IRSP_2016-17/Facts_Figure/Fact_Figures%20English%202016-17.pdf