TRAIN TRAVAILS: NO GOOD NEWS ON THE TRACK AHEAD FOR KONKAN TRAVELLERS
By Frederick Noronha

PANJIM, June 21: Here's the bad news: travellers through the
Konkan have tough times coming. India's most ambitious rail
project of the twentieth century is looking likely to get bogged
down in landslides, technical swamps and financial quagmires.

This is the prognosis of environmentalists who have tapped
technical skills to study a project which, when they questioned
its planning earlier, they had been termed anti-national.

It may be recalled that last week itself services of a number of
trains passing through the Konkan Railway route. Services have
since resumed, but complaints have come up about the frequent
breakdowns in monsoon services along this route.

Monsoons are trying times for travellers passing through the
tough, if not treacherous, terrain of the Konkan. To make things
worse, the young Konkan Railway has been plagued by disrupted
services almost yearly since it was launched three monsoons back
in early 1998.

Not just reliable travel, the Konkan Railway has also failed to
deliver a lot by way of promises made.

Its engineers had spoken about 160 kmph trains, and a Mumbai-Goa
journey in eight hours. "Today, with barely over one-tenth of
planned trains plying, it takes 10 to 14 hours. If the full
number of 120 promised trains were running, they would have to
wait for each other continually on a siding, and the journey
would take upto of 20 hours," he argues.

Says Simoes: "If they manage more trains on this single-track
railway, they'll have to pay for it in terms of time and safety
-- there'll be less time for maintenance between trains."

Also suffocation levels in tunnels could increase. "If you have a
train passing every 10 minutes, the risk is increased
tremendously -- to life and to health. It's a disaster waiting to
happen...," Simoes said in an interview.

Simoes' study points to other unsafe conditions on the KRC route
-- mandatory guard rails are not used on bridges, overbridges,
viaducts, in tunnels, at level crossings and below underbridges.

Embankments have been sinking, and at spots like Cortalim and
Mayem-Tikhazan in Goa the embankments need people regularly
posted to do "running repairs". Landslides and rockfalls in
cuttings have also been a regular feature. Officials themselves
admitted that there were some 144 rockfalls in the 1998 monsoon.

Indian Railways depends on cross-subsidies. Passengers get
cheaper travel, while freight is charged more. "But this railway
can't run goods trains, as it cannot take the weight. So
passengers end up paying 40% more than Indian Railway rates."

"In the long-term, KRC service will gradually deteriorate. It
won't get better. How long can you fool the government into
giving money_ It's like building a skyscraper on a very weak
foundation. Slowly it's going to sink," charges Simoes.

Says cost-engineer Anthony Simoes: "It's an economic failure
because it is a technical failure. Not the other way round. It
would have paid for itself had the trains run (as promised). At
best, KRC will be able to run 20 trains daily, because of all the
problems associated with a wrong choice of alignment."

Simoes who built railroads in Australia was shocked by the way
the Konkan Railway was being built that he turned into an
environmentalist. He still spends much of his time at the Mapusa-
based Goa Foundation green campaign group led by Dr Claude Alvares.

Environmentalists, affected villagers and even Church groups had
made an issue of the alignment that the railway had chosen, while
it was being built.

"In Goa, at the time when we were fighting the issue, we didn't
have information for entire issue. Only after the (one-man
enquiry commission of Justice G.N.) Oza left and we went through
all the documentation that he provided, did we realise that there
was a major problem in Maharashtra too," says Simoes, greyer
after years of campaigning but still passionate about the Konkan
Railway issue.

Simoes argues that if KRC engineers -- allegedly in a hurry to
put up the project at the promptings of Konkan and Mangalore-
linked politicians like George Fernandes and Madhu Dandavate --
had simply stuck to an earlier route planned by a railway
official called Marathe.

"They would have not had the two biggest problems they had -- the
Karbude tunnel and the Panvel Nadi viaduct," he says.

Adds Simoes: "By changing the route they've added 16 tunnels.
That jacked up the costs so much."

He argues that with a project running into thousands of crores,
for every day's delay you are losing one crore. So, for a project
delayed by four years, you're losing Rs 1200 crores. "Not on
construction cost, but just the cost of money," says he.

Today, trains are forced to run slow. Sinking embankments,
tunnels which can't take trains at high speeds, and rockfalls
ensure this, says Simoes.

Simoes argues that normally railway-building engineers should do
four surveys, and then decide on an alignment. "They sat in
office and drew an alignment, then they surveyed it when came to
the point of starting work."

Because of that, he believes, when found they couldn't do the
job, they brought in 11 foreign technologies -- three from Japan,
four from Germany, one each from USA and England, and two from
Sweden. "All this cost them foreign exchange," he adds.

KRC's 120-trains-per-day based economics expected the project
would cost Rs 1800 crore. "Today, they've already spent Rs 4500
crore, and are running merely 14 trains a day. How do you expect
the railway to become economically viable_" asks Simoes.

After carefully scrutinising the project, he points to other
flaws: a supposedly complete project is still borrowing money,
and sucked in Rs 626 crores between August and October 1999.

Due to the interest burden and devaluation, foreign loans taken
in 1997 from abroad worth Rs 384 crore could need around Rs 1200
crore to repay, when this becomes due in 1992.

This project was meant to be completed on a BoT -- build-operate-
transfer -- basis. The Konkan Railway Corporation was expected to
recover its investments in ten years, break even, and merge with
government rail operations.

Today, there's no chance of breaking even for years. "The BoT
concept is dead and buried," adds Simoes. Simoes says the 2001
budget has allotted Rs 350 crores only to pay interest for one
year on borrowed money -- one crore a day.

Like a fan keeping a cricket score, Simoes keeps a close track
over the railway's doings. His figures: In the first five months,
eight people have died on the tracks in Goa alone. Some 28 till
May 2000. The KRC is supposed to be fenced in accordance to
railway safety requirements.

The KRC has huge unpaid dues with contractors and suppliers.
Also, it has not yet finished paying for the land it acquired.
Besides there are over 1500 cases filed against the Corporation
for higher compensation in various courts, and in cases farmers
got just 80 paisa for a square metre of fertile paddy fields.

In the first 3 weeks of the 1998 monsoon the Margao-Mumbai trains
were late every day, the delays ranging from 3 hours to 23 hours.
There were at least 13 derailments, 132 landslides and two  
embankment collapses in this period.

But, most of these occurrences go unreported. "They happen in god
forsaken places where the people have no access to the media and
could not be bothered by the incident anyway," says Simoes.

Says an angry Simoes: "KRC has achieved 10% of the predicted
benefits at four times the projected cost. The benefit to cost
ratio is only 2.5% of what the KRC had promised in 1990." (ENDS)

CONTACT: Anthony Simoes can be contacted via Goa Foundation,
email