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Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry
The fascinating story of the network that made modern India The railways brought modernity to India. Its vast network connected the far corners of the subcontinent, making travel, communication and commerce simpler than ever before. Even more importantly, the railways played a large part in the making of the by connecting historically and geographically disparate regions and people, it forever changed the way Indians lived and thought, and eventually made a national identity possible. This engagingly written, anecdotally told history captures the immense power of a business behemoth as well as the romance of train travel; tracing the growth of the railways from the 1830s (when the first plans were made) to Independence, Bibek Debroy and his co-authors recount how the railway network was built in India and how it grew to become a lifeline that still weaves the nation together. This latest volume in The Story of Indian Business series will delight anyone interested in finding out more about the Indian Railways.
264 pages, Paperback
Published February 15, 2017
22 people are currently reading
236 people want to read
About the author
Bibek Debroy
158 books390 followersBibek Debroy was an Indian economist, who served as the chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. He was also the Chairman of the Finance Ministry's 'Expert Committee for Infrastructure Classification and Financing Framework for Amrit Kaal'. Debroy has made significant contributions to game theory, economic theory, income and social inequalities, poverty, law reforms, railway reforms and Indology among others. From its inception in January 2015 until June 2019, Mr. Debroy was a member of the NITI Aayog, the think tank of the Indian Government. He was awarded the Padma Shri (the fourth-highest civilian honour in India) in 2015.
Bibek Debroy's recent co-authored magnum opus, Inked in India, stands distinguished as the premier comprehensive documentation, capturing the entirety of recognized fountain pen, nib, and ink manufacturers in India.
In 2016, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the US-India Business Summit. In 2022, he was conferred with the Lifetime Achievement Award by The Australia India Chamber of Commerce (AICC). In February 2024, Debroy was conferred Insolvency Law Academy Emeritus Fellowship, in recognition of his distinguished leadership, public service, work and contributions in the field of insolvency.
Bibek Debroy died on 1 November 2024, at the age of 69. He had been admitted to All India Institutes of Medical Sciences in New Delhi one month prior.
Bibek Debroy's recent co-authored magnum opus, Inked in India, stands distinguished as the premier comprehensive documentation, capturing the entirety of recognized fountain pen, nib, and ink manufacturers in India.
In 2016, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the US-India Business Summit. In 2022, he was conferred with the Lifetime Achievement Award by The Australia India Chamber of Commerce (AICC). In February 2024, Debroy was conferred Insolvency Law Academy Emeritus Fellowship, in recognition of his distinguished leadership, public service, work and contributions in the field of insolvency.
Bibek Debroy died on 1 November 2024, at the age of 69. He had been admitted to All India Institutes of Medical Sciences in New Delhi one month prior.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 4, 2017
I was terribly disappointed with this book. The title of the book is so promising and interesting that I expected a fascinating story of one of the major lifelines of our country, our Railways. What I got in return was a boring tome of a book with nothing original of its own. So much of this book is borrowed from other people's work that I found it extremely difficult to keep a track of which part was written by the authors and which part was quoted. The writing style is so boring that I had to power me through every page of the book. It seemed more like a government report than a story of Indian railways. Too bad that I bought this book. Will now have to look for a way to get atleast some part of my money back. My only suggestion will be to not waste your time and money on this book.
April 9, 2020
It is not easy to envisage that the characters who fashioned Indian railways belonged to a clan of heroes and legends. But this is precisely what the authors of this volume have us believe, by showcasing the lives of engineers of the likes of Rowland Stephenson, John Chapman and Arthur Cotton in this lively volume. Stephenson thought of not only linking London and Calcutta by rail, which would decrease the trip between England and its Indian empire to ten days, but also sought to tie Calcutta with Peking and Hong Kong.
More than any other produce of the industrial revolution—with the probable exemption of electricity—the railways affected the very way Indians lived and even contemplated. They made us abruptly think in terms of class, not caste. They ushered in modernity.
By establishing divisions of travel (there were over five passenger ranks in pre-Independence India) we were introduced to the contemporary usage of ‘first class’, ‘second class’, and so on.
The story of Indian railways, we learn from this book, commenced in London in the 1840s. The advocates were audacious, indomitable men, who got in touch with Britain’s merchants, manufacturers and shipping interests, to whom they held out the prospect of a vast and opulent India.
Once opened up by railways, they said, India would become a remarkable supply house of cotton and wheat, and a colossal end user of textiles and manufactured merchandise of Britain. They told the large mercantile houses that they could transport coal by rail to Calcutta from the mines of West Bengal and become even richer. They fashioned a controlling federation in Parliament, and jointly exerted immense weight on the British government. Coming out trumps in the end by acquiring hugely flattering contracts that allowed them to raise funds in Britain to fabricate and administer their railway maneuvers in India, they realized that things couldn’t get better.
The East Indian Railway Company was one of the first to get going. It built and operated a line running a few dozen miles north of Calcutta along the Hooghly River.
Later, it extended it to the coalmines, 100 miles north-west of Calcutta, and subsequently to the well-populated and fertile Ganges valley. About the same time, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company constructed a second line running north from Bombay for thirty-five miles to Kalyan, which it expanded later over the Western Ghats into the rich cotton fields of the Deccan. Many lines followed thereafter.
The cost of construction was high, as our authors point out, partly because the companies had a guaranteed return of cost plus five per cent. They had little incentive to economize, and they built carelessly and lavishly. When the work was defective, they simply rebuilt.
They erected stations in a grand style and provided luxury coaches for upper-class passengers.
Thus was one of the world’s greatest railway systems built. It was the largest single injection of British capital into India’s economy, and the network went on to become the third largest in the world.
At Independence, in 1947, it was more than 50,000 miles long, employing more than a million men, with 9000 locomotives, 225,000 freight cars, and more than 16,000 passenger coaches.
As we noted, the railways had a profound effect on millions of lives as people began to move and merchants began to send their goods to distant parts of the country. New towns came up along the railway lines. However, there was also a downside.
Artisans in villages and towns began to lose their living because they could not compete with British-manufactured goods that began to arrive rapidly. Earlier, the peasants had stored their surplus grains in the good years. Now the railways began to carry food and commercial crops to the ports for export. Reserves were thus depleted, and in the devastating famine years of the 1870s and 1890s, there was no stored surplus to fall back on. It would have needed a more benign and far-thinking government to prevent the downside.
Subsequent to the attainment of Independence, the railways crumpled this societal segregation into two classes. The caste mindset of Indians still persists. And, if truth be told, the railway has played a momentous part in altering the pejorative world view of many.
Imagine how the world must have seemed to the ordinary Indian who had never seen anyone or anything move at a speed greater than fifteen kilometres an hour. The railways liberated us from our narrow, provincial mindset that had been limited to local customs, local knowledge and local connections. They brought us travelling merchants, artisans, singers and new products.
After the 1860s, our horizons began to expand to a world of distant towns and unfamiliar landscapes. And, like the English language, the railways helped to unify India and give us an Indian ‘world view’. They changed our public spaces. Major Indian cities were reshaped around railways.
As aforestated, the railways were bred in the womb of the industrial revolution. The authors commence with an oft-repeated quote from Karl Marx, who foretold that railways would generate an industrial insurrection in India and absolutely renovate the country. That they did not is another story. By the First World War, some thought India was well nigh in the take off stage.
The authors enlighten the readers that India had 28,000 miles of rail track by 1905, making it the third prevalent railway network in the entire world. Added to this was the fact that India boated of the world’s major jute manufacturing industry, the fourth biggest cotton textile industry, the leading canal system, and held over two and a half per cent of world trade. Last but in no way the least, She had a fizzy rank of merchants, ravenous to become entrepreneurs.
As history has it, post-World War I, industrialization did hasten. British industries becoming active in upplying war-needs gave up exporting goods for colonial markets. It was a first-rate prospect for Indian industries to supply vacant Indian markets with their products. Entrepreneus such as G.D. Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai and others made massive trading profits throughout World War I and reinvested them in establishing industries. Between 1913 and 1938, Indian manufacturing output grew 5.6 per cent a year, well ahead of the world average of 3.3 per cent.
The authors point out that the railway network had neglected freight, and also that its construction had bypassed significant geographical parts of the country. Moreover, India’s agriculture remained stagnant. You cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population. Thus, to conclude, the extended consequences of this grand venture were limited. By contrast, Japan’s railways, built at the same time, delivered more positive results. The Japanese had economized with their limited capital and had built a more geographically intensive network.
The Indian railway network, although huge in absolute terms, was comparatively small, in both per-capita and per-square mile terms. In 1937, India had twenty-six miles of railway lines per 1000 square miles of land, when the US had 80 and Germany 253. This partially explains why the railways did not engender an industrial revolution in India. Sadly, the massive construction of the railways was not enough to modernize the Indian economy. India alone, among the great railway countries, remained relatively un-industrialized. In the other railway powers—the United States, Russia and Germany—the railway had been a dynamo of the industrial revolution. It had no such effect in India. Nevertheless, it is a powerful British legacy in a landscape of backwardness. Without the railways, India would have been even less industrialized.
Indian nationalists have blamed the British Raj for this failure. Marx believed that capital exploits, and Indian nationalists jumped on this bandwagon to argue that British capital was ‘exploitive’. I disagree. Anyone who wanted India to become modern, prosperous and middle class should have wanted loads of investment. In fact, Britain did not ‘exploit’ India enough. Had it made the enormous investments in India that it did in the Americas, India would have become prosperous and a much bigger market for British goods. A richer India would have been even a better customer and a better supplier. An impoverished India was not in Britain’s economic interest.
Our nationalists have failed to comprehend that capital is a progressive force, however exploitative it may appear. Marx understood this. He knew that capitalism is the only efficient way to accumulate capital, make investments, raise output, and increase productivity. Even today, many Indians, with their phobia of multinationals, have not learned this lesson. Even the nationalists, who understood that foreign investment is positive, felt there was a British conspiracy to deliberately under-invest in India, or to sabotage Indian business interests.
In the present day, Indian Railways is the ‘Indian government in miniature’ — superior in quantity but underprivileged in excellence. Every single day they interlace a country in concert. A recent report suggests that in 2015–16, they sold 8.6 billion tickets, which translates into roughly seven journeys per person per year. A nation is on the move, thanks in part to the railways. The poorest Indian is mobile because railway tickets are cheaper than almost anywhere in the world.
This is the good news!
The bad news is that the Indian Railways are inefficient, hopelessly over-manned, utterly politicized, sometimes corrupt, and provide shoddy, callous service. No one dreams of transporting goods by rail, not only because tariffs are uncompetitively high. As a result, even coal, petrol and diesel are inefficiently transported by road. This bias against freight is, of course, a historical one, as the authors of this volume point out.
Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry by Bibek Debroy, Sanjay Chadha and Vidya Krishnamurthi is a delightful endeavor to evoke the command and art of the building of, and travel on, the railways in India, from the mid-nineteenth century to Independence. This book presents you with a convoluted and meticulous account of building railways in India. As a student of Indian culture you would be the beneficiary of a ton of information.
At least two of my very close buddies, who are champion academicians in their own right, repeatedly dissuaded me from taking this book up. There are countless others they said. I agree with them partially. There are innumerable texts on railway history – from the very very luscious authorized narration by J. N. Sahni, to the more modern-day ones by Bhandari, Christian Wolmar or Kerr. This book does a fair enough job, I must admit. Though the narrative gets smidgen scholastic at times, you would begin enjoying it once you start reading between the lines and connecting the dots.
More than any other produce of the industrial revolution—with the probable exemption of electricity—the railways affected the very way Indians lived and even contemplated. They made us abruptly think in terms of class, not caste. They ushered in modernity.
By establishing divisions of travel (there were over five passenger ranks in pre-Independence India) we were introduced to the contemporary usage of ‘first class’, ‘second class’, and so on.
The story of Indian railways, we learn from this book, commenced in London in the 1840s. The advocates were audacious, indomitable men, who got in touch with Britain’s merchants, manufacturers and shipping interests, to whom they held out the prospect of a vast and opulent India.
Once opened up by railways, they said, India would become a remarkable supply house of cotton and wheat, and a colossal end user of textiles and manufactured merchandise of Britain. They told the large mercantile houses that they could transport coal by rail to Calcutta from the mines of West Bengal and become even richer. They fashioned a controlling federation in Parliament, and jointly exerted immense weight on the British government. Coming out trumps in the end by acquiring hugely flattering contracts that allowed them to raise funds in Britain to fabricate and administer their railway maneuvers in India, they realized that things couldn’t get better.
The East Indian Railway Company was one of the first to get going. It built and operated a line running a few dozen miles north of Calcutta along the Hooghly River.
Later, it extended it to the coalmines, 100 miles north-west of Calcutta, and subsequently to the well-populated and fertile Ganges valley. About the same time, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway Company constructed a second line running north from Bombay for thirty-five miles to Kalyan, which it expanded later over the Western Ghats into the rich cotton fields of the Deccan. Many lines followed thereafter.
The cost of construction was high, as our authors point out, partly because the companies had a guaranteed return of cost plus five per cent. They had little incentive to economize, and they built carelessly and lavishly. When the work was defective, they simply rebuilt.
They erected stations in a grand style and provided luxury coaches for upper-class passengers.
Thus was one of the world’s greatest railway systems built. It was the largest single injection of British capital into India’s economy, and the network went on to become the third largest in the world.
At Independence, in 1947, it was more than 50,000 miles long, employing more than a million men, with 9000 locomotives, 225,000 freight cars, and more than 16,000 passenger coaches.
As we noted, the railways had a profound effect on millions of lives as people began to move and merchants began to send their goods to distant parts of the country. New towns came up along the railway lines. However, there was also a downside.
Artisans in villages and towns began to lose their living because they could not compete with British-manufactured goods that began to arrive rapidly. Earlier, the peasants had stored their surplus grains in the good years. Now the railways began to carry food and commercial crops to the ports for export. Reserves were thus depleted, and in the devastating famine years of the 1870s and 1890s, there was no stored surplus to fall back on. It would have needed a more benign and far-thinking government to prevent the downside.
Subsequent to the attainment of Independence, the railways crumpled this societal segregation into two classes. The caste mindset of Indians still persists. And, if truth be told, the railway has played a momentous part in altering the pejorative world view of many.
Imagine how the world must have seemed to the ordinary Indian who had never seen anyone or anything move at a speed greater than fifteen kilometres an hour. The railways liberated us from our narrow, provincial mindset that had been limited to local customs, local knowledge and local connections. They brought us travelling merchants, artisans, singers and new products.
After the 1860s, our horizons began to expand to a world of distant towns and unfamiliar landscapes. And, like the English language, the railways helped to unify India and give us an Indian ‘world view’. They changed our public spaces. Major Indian cities were reshaped around railways.
As aforestated, the railways were bred in the womb of the industrial revolution. The authors commence with an oft-repeated quote from Karl Marx, who foretold that railways would generate an industrial insurrection in India and absolutely renovate the country. That they did not is another story. By the First World War, some thought India was well nigh in the take off stage.
The authors enlighten the readers that India had 28,000 miles of rail track by 1905, making it the third prevalent railway network in the entire world. Added to this was the fact that India boated of the world’s major jute manufacturing industry, the fourth biggest cotton textile industry, the leading canal system, and held over two and a half per cent of world trade. Last but in no way the least, She had a fizzy rank of merchants, ravenous to become entrepreneurs.
As history has it, post-World War I, industrialization did hasten. British industries becoming active in upplying war-needs gave up exporting goods for colonial markets. It was a first-rate prospect for Indian industries to supply vacant Indian markets with their products. Entrepreneus such as G.D. Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai and others made massive trading profits throughout World War I and reinvested them in establishing industries. Between 1913 and 1938, Indian manufacturing output grew 5.6 per cent a year, well ahead of the world average of 3.3 per cent.
The authors point out that the railway network had neglected freight, and also that its construction had bypassed significant geographical parts of the country. Moreover, India’s agriculture remained stagnant. You cannot have an industrial revolution without an agricultural surplus or the means to feed a rapidly growing urban population. Thus, to conclude, the extended consequences of this grand venture were limited. By contrast, Japan’s railways, built at the same time, delivered more positive results. The Japanese had economized with their limited capital and had built a more geographically intensive network.
The Indian railway network, although huge in absolute terms, was comparatively small, in both per-capita and per-square mile terms. In 1937, India had twenty-six miles of railway lines per 1000 square miles of land, when the US had 80 and Germany 253. This partially explains why the railways did not engender an industrial revolution in India. Sadly, the massive construction of the railways was not enough to modernize the Indian economy. India alone, among the great railway countries, remained relatively un-industrialized. In the other railway powers—the United States, Russia and Germany—the railway had been a dynamo of the industrial revolution. It had no such effect in India. Nevertheless, it is a powerful British legacy in a landscape of backwardness. Without the railways, India would have been even less industrialized.
Indian nationalists have blamed the British Raj for this failure. Marx believed that capital exploits, and Indian nationalists jumped on this bandwagon to argue that British capital was ‘exploitive’. I disagree. Anyone who wanted India to become modern, prosperous and middle class should have wanted loads of investment. In fact, Britain did not ‘exploit’ India enough. Had it made the enormous investments in India that it did in the Americas, India would have become prosperous and a much bigger market for British goods. A richer India would have been even a better customer and a better supplier. An impoverished India was not in Britain’s economic interest.
Our nationalists have failed to comprehend that capital is a progressive force, however exploitative it may appear. Marx understood this. He knew that capitalism is the only efficient way to accumulate capital, make investments, raise output, and increase productivity. Even today, many Indians, with their phobia of multinationals, have not learned this lesson. Even the nationalists, who understood that foreign investment is positive, felt there was a British conspiracy to deliberately under-invest in India, or to sabotage Indian business interests.
In the present day, Indian Railways is the ‘Indian government in miniature’ — superior in quantity but underprivileged in excellence. Every single day they interlace a country in concert. A recent report suggests that in 2015–16, they sold 8.6 billion tickets, which translates into roughly seven journeys per person per year. A nation is on the move, thanks in part to the railways. The poorest Indian is mobile because railway tickets are cheaper than almost anywhere in the world.
This is the good news!
The bad news is that the Indian Railways are inefficient, hopelessly over-manned, utterly politicized, sometimes corrupt, and provide shoddy, callous service. No one dreams of transporting goods by rail, not only because tariffs are uncompetitively high. As a result, even coal, petrol and diesel are inefficiently transported by road. This bias against freight is, of course, a historical one, as the authors of this volume point out.
Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry by Bibek Debroy, Sanjay Chadha and Vidya Krishnamurthi is a delightful endeavor to evoke the command and art of the building of, and travel on, the railways in India, from the mid-nineteenth century to Independence. This book presents you with a convoluted and meticulous account of building railways in India. As a student of Indian culture you would be the beneficiary of a ton of information.
At least two of my very close buddies, who are champion academicians in their own right, repeatedly dissuaded me from taking this book up. There are countless others they said. I agree with them partially. There are innumerable texts on railway history – from the very very luscious authorized narration by J. N. Sahni, to the more modern-day ones by Bhandari, Christian Wolmar or Kerr. This book does a fair enough job, I must admit. Though the narrative gets smidgen scholastic at times, you would begin enjoying it once you start reading between the lines and connecting the dots.
August 27, 2018
Boring. Very disappointing. It is a classic case of a recipe gone wrong despite all good ingredients. Authors did good research, added ancedotes and long quotes from other works and speeches.... and yet fail to write an interesting book. Book has a lot of facts but nothing more....
November 11, 2019
An intricate and detailed account of building railways in India -- includes a ton of information on the hundreds of private British companies that built the railway, which later came under the management of the government of British India. Lots of interesting titbits and piles of information for the discerning and meticulous railway nerd. Point to note, it stops short of the Indian independence, so there's very little information about the present day system.
February 23, 2021
Has a lot of interesting fundaes. And engagingly written.
Big downside is that the quotes are way too long and break the flow
Big downside is that the quotes are way too long and break the flow
September 18, 2018
> When did Karl Marx write this piece? He wrote it on 22 July 1853, though it was first published on 8 August 1853. 1853 is important because that’s the official date—16 April, to be precise—for the start of the railways in India, and Marx must have known about this.
>
> (Thus, in the centennial year in 1953, a postage stamp was issued to celebrate the occasion.)
After a long and pointless (prophetic for Debroy) quote, this is how the book opens. Way too many words to say too little. And the authors are natural born governmental bureaucrats. Every abstraction becomes some sort of deity. *The Railways* have a start date. And a lot of other certainties reasonable researches should avoid.
>
> (Thus, in the centennial year in 1953, a postage stamp was issued to celebrate the occasion.)
After a long and pointless (prophetic for Debroy) quote, this is how the book opens. Way too many words to say too little. And the authors are natural born governmental bureaucrats. Every abstraction becomes some sort of deity. *The Railways* have a start date. And a lot of other certainties reasonable researches should avoid.
May 2, 2018
Bibek Roy's work looks at the structural foundations of the Indian Railways till 1947, delving into its origins as corporations with a mandate to provide value to its distant shareholders (some of them survived till 2016). The book tries to connect the present practice of cross-subsidising passenger with freight to early deficits in planning and other priorities of the colonial regime. Karl Marx's famous prediction of the Railways serving as stepping stone for industrialization in this country also finds mention with an explanation of why many like Marx have been proved wrong. The book reminds of how little is known about this marvel that touches a million lives every day.
November 12, 2017
Perfect research book
I recommend this book to all serious researchers of Indian railway, but I think the details are little too much for reader like me..who just want to learn about the historical facts of IR. The book goes deep into the economics which got sometime too tiresome to understand.
I recommend this book to all serious researchers of Indian railway, but I think the details are little too much for reader like me..who just want to learn about the historical facts of IR. The book goes deep into the economics which got sometime too tiresome to understand.
August 4, 2019
The book captures data, quotes, correspondences, and inferences. It is written in an extremely dry and academic style. Enriching read for those already interested / passionate about the Indian Railways, but could be perceived as an absolute bore for the other set of readers. Read a chapter of this book at a bookstore / friends place before purchasing your own copy.
January 7, 2018
A good read about history of Indian Railways. Looking at how vast reference texts (mostly relevant ones) have been produced as-is in the pages, one gets an impression that this book has been hurriedly put together by the authors and editors.
May 31, 2025
An absolute dredge to get through. It rambles and drags on for pages about nothing at all, while touting itself to be a book that does anything but. Reading the Wikipedia article would be a more worthwhile pursuit.
December 13, 2018
Good insights about the history of Indian railways. Interested in History & Trains, then this book is a must read
April 3, 2024
पुस्तक अपने नाम और जुड़े हुए लेखकों की प्रसिद्धि से प्रभावित करती है। किंतु जब आप इसे पढ़ने जाते हैं तो यह भारतीय रेलवे पर upsc में अधिकाधिक अंक प्राप्त करने के लिए लिखे गए निबंध सरीखी प्रतीत होती है। जहां अनेकों तथ्य हैं पर आपके काम के नहीं। लगता है कि अपनी आयोग की रिपोर्ट के साथ ही लेखकों द्वारा इसे तैयार किया गया है।
March 15, 2017
Written in a language that is difficult to understand, especially for laymen. Only some parts of the book were interesting. Please dont buy the book, borrow it from a local library.
October 26, 2017
This book on the Indian Railways is writtten in a very scholary and academic style and that makes it difficult to trudge through. However the content of the book is quite rich with focus more upon the history of the institution and the institution building process. It tells us how the early debates on the viability of the Railways took place, what were the difficulties in the Govt. guarantee system, how complex the ownership and management of Railways was back then, how the several companies merged with each other, how the Railway Board came in 1905, etc.
The book also touches upon the heritage mountain railways, the rail thugs, Gandhi's views on railways, the Railway Police, etc but the interesting aspects are given too few pages. Overall a good read but not an engaging one. Still worth a try as books on Indian Railways are not many and this one is good to learn about the railways' foundation and its growth trajectory.
The book also touches upon the heritage mountain railways, the rail thugs, Gandhi's views on railways, the Railway Police, etc but the interesting aspects are given too few pages. Overall a good read but not an engaging one. Still worth a try as books on Indian Railways are not many and this one is good to learn about the railways' foundation and its growth trajectory.
August 5, 2024
I tried to read the book... twice. Especially because the cover seemed fascinating.
I bought it thinking it will have stories of the growth of railways. But mostly it seems to be about the pre-independence infrastructure and different controlling government bodies.
But it has been a disappointment.
Both times I tried, I couldn't read past some 30 pages. And that too, when I was skipping the boring references.
The book clarifies in the preface that it's purpose is not to be another dry, boring, academic work about Indian Railways... unattractive to the general reader.
But it turns out to be the same. At best, this book will serve as a source of research on history of Indian Railways.
Not recommended as a general read.
I bought it thinking it will have stories of the growth of railways. But mostly it seems to be about the pre-independence infrastructure and different controlling government bodies.
But it has been a disappointment.
Both times I tried, I couldn't read past some 30 pages. And that too, when I was skipping the boring references.
The book clarifies in the preface that it's purpose is not to be another dry, boring, academic work about Indian Railways... unattractive to the general reader.
But it turns out to be the same. At best, this book will serve as a source of research on history of Indian Railways.
Not recommended as a general read.
April 5, 2017
Since it is an anecdotal history of Indian railway from its contested inception in 1830 to independence of India in 1947 , it presents a long span of period. After reading the introduction by Gurcharan Das, i had high hope from the rest of the book but unfortunately it was not the case (personal opinion). Book is heavily quoted from old source documents, and the contributors, only add little tidbits to it. The narrative style is little enlongating as well as overwhelming.
May 3, 2017
India’s railway network is fully owned by the government and is the largest visible embodiment of state power for all practical purposes. A major part of the railway infrastructure was made in British times with a commercial motive to speed up the flow of raw materials from India’s hinterland to the factories on the coast and in England and also to facilitate the trade in finished goods pouring out of England with the markets of India. This was the largest single injection of British capital into India’s economy. In 1947, 50000 miles of lines were laid, a million men were employed and the railway companies possessed an impressive array of 9000 locomotives, 225000 freight cars and 16000 passenger coaches. This anecdotal history of railways in India covers the early stages around 1830s when experimental lines were set up and right up to independence in 1947. This book is significant for the general reader as every Indian is said to have at least ‘one impossibly romantic railway memory’. The authors are leading bureaucrats in the national government. Bibek Debroy is a member of the Niti Aayog, Sanjay Chadha is a joint secretary in the ministry of commerce and Vidya Krishnamurthi is a researcher with Indicus Foundation, New Delhi who had previously worked for Niti Aayog. This book is also the tenth volume in the series of Indian Business being published under the stewardship of Gurcharan Das who has presented this book with a neat introduction.
In fact, Gurcharan Das’ introduction is the only saving grace of the book, since the main text is presented haphazardly and with a shocking disregard to structure. Das makes some original observations which is indeed simple but profound. He remarks that railways made sweeping changes in India. Our pre-modern world had been space-bound and time-free. The only difficulty faced by the villagers was how to travel long distances for a pilgrimage, without any thought to the time it might take. Railways changed all that and our modern world became space-free, but time-bound. Perhaps a reviewer in the future may laugh at this assumption of superior means of transport we treat to be the privileges of the era in which we live in! The fares were not cheap. A person could walk 600 miles and live at a lesser cost for a month, than the rates charged for third class, as remarked by a European who saw the fare structure firsthand. We might wonder at the elaborate and ornate buildings of some of the Victorian era stations we see around us as to its utility. The book provides the answer. The early lines were built following a ‘guarantee system’. The government guaranteed to the company a return of all the expenses added with a 5% profit margin. Such assurances were a recipe for extravagance. There was no incentive to economize on the expenditure and the companies spent money like water to build ostentatious buildings that later brought renown and heritage status. Troubled conditions during the 1857 war of independence forced the authorities to fortify major stations in the North.
The book presents some interesting anecdotes on the gradual development of amenities in trains. Lights, fans, bath rooms and sleeping berths were all later additions and amusing episodes are narrated as to the cause of its coming into being. However, this is the only thing that can be cited in favour of the book. Incongruously for a book of such scope, it abruptly stops at 1947. Probably the bureaucrats who are also the authors of the book wanted to avoid any remarks that might be construed as critical to government policy. But, if you look carefully, the description of events ends around 1910 itself, the later occurrences are just glanced over. The book includes long verbatim extracts and quotes from reports, newspaper articles and comments made in the nineteenth century. In one instance, such a quote runs for 12 consecutive pages! Out of the total 225 pages of the book, about half may be thought of as quotes! A table on the chronology of railways runs through 11 pages, which is hardly intelligible and perfectly useless. There are repetitions in many chapters which suggest the poor quality of coordination between the authors. Such lack of coordination and cooperation is a hallmark of the bureaucracy.
This book is the tenth volume in the series ‘Story of Indian Business’. This fact is not advertised anywhere on the cover, but discreetly mentioned in Gurcharan Das’ introduction. Anyway, this book is a complete disappointment that would damage the reputation and relevance of the whole series. It is also marked by lack of insight and observation on the part of the authors. All scholars remark that the railways had brought about a silent social revolution in India by the non-segregation among Indians. The Europeans made the two upper classes their privilege, true, but the Indian upper castes didn’t enjoy such a convenience however hard they pressed for it. The upper castes had to travel in third class mingled with untouchables and outcastes in the carriages. That railway could bring about such a transforming social change peacefully in a matter of decades is an outstanding achievement that must be applauded as vociferously as possible. But surprisingly, the authors keep mum on this issue. It may be that they don’t subscribe to the idea, but then they should have lambasted it with convincing logic and examples.
The reference materials used in the work are also not impeccable. Many of them are bodily taken from the famous website of IRFCA (Indian Railway Fan Club Association). The book does not provide an index. Some of the photographs provided are also not very appealing.
The book is not recommended.
In fact, Gurcharan Das’ introduction is the only saving grace of the book, since the main text is presented haphazardly and with a shocking disregard to structure. Das makes some original observations which is indeed simple but profound. He remarks that railways made sweeping changes in India. Our pre-modern world had been space-bound and time-free. The only difficulty faced by the villagers was how to travel long distances for a pilgrimage, without any thought to the time it might take. Railways changed all that and our modern world became space-free, but time-bound. Perhaps a reviewer in the future may laugh at this assumption of superior means of transport we treat to be the privileges of the era in which we live in! The fares were not cheap. A person could walk 600 miles and live at a lesser cost for a month, than the rates charged for third class, as remarked by a European who saw the fare structure firsthand. We might wonder at the elaborate and ornate buildings of some of the Victorian era stations we see around us as to its utility. The book provides the answer. The early lines were built following a ‘guarantee system’. The government guaranteed to the company a return of all the expenses added with a 5% profit margin. Such assurances were a recipe for extravagance. There was no incentive to economize on the expenditure and the companies spent money like water to build ostentatious buildings that later brought renown and heritage status. Troubled conditions during the 1857 war of independence forced the authorities to fortify major stations in the North.
The book presents some interesting anecdotes on the gradual development of amenities in trains. Lights, fans, bath rooms and sleeping berths were all later additions and amusing episodes are narrated as to the cause of its coming into being. However, this is the only thing that can be cited in favour of the book. Incongruously for a book of such scope, it abruptly stops at 1947. Probably the bureaucrats who are also the authors of the book wanted to avoid any remarks that might be construed as critical to government policy. But, if you look carefully, the description of events ends around 1910 itself, the later occurrences are just glanced over. The book includes long verbatim extracts and quotes from reports, newspaper articles and comments made in the nineteenth century. In one instance, such a quote runs for 12 consecutive pages! Out of the total 225 pages of the book, about half may be thought of as quotes! A table on the chronology of railways runs through 11 pages, which is hardly intelligible and perfectly useless. There are repetitions in many chapters which suggest the poor quality of coordination between the authors. Such lack of coordination and cooperation is a hallmark of the bureaucracy.
This book is the tenth volume in the series ‘Story of Indian Business’. This fact is not advertised anywhere on the cover, but discreetly mentioned in Gurcharan Das’ introduction. Anyway, this book is a complete disappointment that would damage the reputation and relevance of the whole series. It is also marked by lack of insight and observation on the part of the authors. All scholars remark that the railways had brought about a silent social revolution in India by the non-segregation among Indians. The Europeans made the two upper classes their privilege, true, but the Indian upper castes didn’t enjoy such a convenience however hard they pressed for it. The upper castes had to travel in third class mingled with untouchables and outcastes in the carriages. That railway could bring about such a transforming social change peacefully in a matter of decades is an outstanding achievement that must be applauded as vociferously as possible. But surprisingly, the authors keep mum on this issue. It may be that they don’t subscribe to the idea, but then they should have lambasted it with convincing logic and examples.
The reference materials used in the work are also not impeccable. Many of them are bodily taken from the famous website of IRFCA (Indian Railway Fan Club Association). The book does not provide an index. Some of the photographs provided are also not very appealing.
The book is not recommended.
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