For as long as India has had trains, rail travel for most people has meant endless queues for tickets, filthy and overcrowded platforms and spine-crunching journeys on cramped wooden seats.

But travelling by train in India will never be the same again, according to plans announced yesterday by Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Minister of Railways. He pledged to replace all wooden benches with cushion-covered seats, to open 6,000 ticket machines over the next two years and even to equip ticket collectors with hand-held computers.

Tickets will be sold from petrol stations and bank machines, while railway stations will be spruced up in a “year of cleanliness”, Mr Yadav said as he announced the railway budget for 2007-08.

Within a year 32 new trains will be introduced, including eight more Garib Raths (Poor Man’s Chariots) — the first Indian trains to be fully air-conditioned in all classes. The Railway Ministry will also begin a feasibility study for high-speed trains that can run at 300-350km/h (185-220mph).

All this, Mr Yadav promised, while cutting the price of tickets by up to 8 per cent.

“I am well acquainted with the travails and difficulties faced by passengers travelling in unreserved second-class coaches,” he told a rowdy session of Parliament. “Therefore, we have decided that from 2007-08 production of wooden seats will be stopped.”

Political opponents dismissed Mr Yadav’s proposals as populist gestures designed to deflect criticism of the Government and to further his ambitions. Mr Yadav, 58, heads the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the second-biggest party after Congress in the ruling coalition, and the fare cuts are indeed timely.

The Government is under fire over rising inflation and a corruption scandal involving an Italian businessman said to be a friend of Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born Congress Party leader. But Mr Yadav’s budget was as much about business as politics. The railway network, which carries 15 million people a day, was once the only affordable form of long-distance transport, but now faces intense competition from buses, cars and budget airlines.

“The fact is that railways are modernising to survive,” said D. H. Pai Panandiker, president of the RPG Foundation, an economic think-tank. “With the improvement in roads and the cheapening of air travel, the railways are losing out. The idea here is to attract passengers away from road traffic rather than to help people.”

The Railway Ministry is also reported to be planning to introduce onboard entertainment and fast-food facilities, vending machines and cash machines in stations. Mr Yadav’s other proposals included a 24-hour railway hotline, more lower-class coaches on trains and specially designed carriages for disabled people.

He also pledged to improve security by introducing more closed-circuit television cameras, metal detectors and sniffer dogs at stations and recruiting another 8,000 people to the railway police. Some critics were disappointed by the lack of further security measures given last week’s bomb attack on the Friendship Express to Pakistan, which killed 68 people.

Others cast doubts on the ministry’s ability to deliver its promises in a country where change within the state sector is painfully slow. But Mr Yadav has an impressive track record.

When he took over Indian Railways in 2004, it was saddled with huge losses because of rock-bottom fares and a bloated workforce of nearly 1.6 million. Within a year he had dragged it into the black by freezing the payroll, leasing out advertising space, introducing competitive bidding for catering and converting trains to electricity.

Some of his ideas proved less successful — for instance, trying to ban soft drinks such as Coca-Cola and replace them with buttermilk. He also tried to ban plastic cups and replace them with handmade clay pots. But his overall strategy has been so successful that it is now being studied at Indian and foreign business schools, including Harvard.

Mr Yadav announced yesterday that the railways would make a profit of 200 billion rupees in 2006-07 (£2.3 billion).

All aboard

— There are seven different classes, but few trains offer them all

— The highest is First AC, which costs about the same as an air ticket; the lowest is General, which has wooden seats

— There are 7,000 stations on the 40,000mile network

— Tickets can be booked by mobile phone, SMS and on the internet

— A standard passenger train has 18 coaches — each designed to carry 18-72 people

Source: Times research

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