A new book examines the repercussions of shutting the Indian Railways network during Covid-19

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12-05-2025

Train number 02198, a weekly special from Jabalpur Junction to Coimbatore, and its reverse direction service 02197 from Coimbatore to Jabalpur, may hardly be central to the working of trains in India, but in the railway history, these were the first trains that were cancelled for two weeks on 21 March and 28 March 2020 and on 23 March and 30 March, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in India.
The announcement of the cancellation came on 18 March, by when the Indian Railways had already started issuing advisories for meeting any eventuality arising out of COVID-19, including creating quarantine facilities within its premises. Clearly, no one at the Railway Board, the apex body that runs the railway network through zonal wings, knew the magnitude of what was to come just five days later, though four more trains were cancelled on 19 March through another order.10 How the running of these trains was adding to the spread of COVID-19 no one could tell, but the reason behind their cancellation was commercial. There were low bookings for the trains. People were not willing to travel and even before the government shut the transport lines, many had cut back on their travel plans. At the same time, railway authorities asked passengers to avoid non-essential train journeys and ensure that they did not have fever at the time of commencement of journey. At any point during a journey, if a passenger felt that they had a fever, they were to contact the railway staff for medical attention and further assistance.
As daily advisories from most Union and state government departments started to pour in, the railways was doing their bit to restrict travel. Besides cancelling trains, it decided to withdraw travel concessions as well. It reduced the categories of travellers who were entitled to avail of concessions. Of 55 of them, 23 sub-categories under patients, students and divyangjans (differently abled) were allowed the concessions for both unreserved and reserved segments from 20 March. Those who had already booked tickets availing of the concessions were, however, also allowed the discounted fare. Among those for whom travel concessions were withdrawn were senior citizens, since they were the most vulnerable category of the population. What came on 22 March 2020, nonetheless, was a complete shocker: the Indian Railways stopped all passenger trains, something it had never done before on its own.
A little over 46 years ago was the only time that the railway services had halted countrywide, though the Indira Gandhi government had roped in the territorial army to run train services. It was on 8 May 1974 that the All India Railwaymen's Federation (AIRF) decided to implement a national rail strike after 44‐year‐old socialist leader and organiser of the strike, George Fernandes, and more than 1,000 other union leaders were arrested.
Just a few days earlier, S Dhasarathy, a young railway engineer, was asked to move to Erode as divisional mechanical engineer in charge of the railway diesel shed there. It was the evening of 1 May, and his sister's marriage celebrations were going on in his house in Chennai when Dhasarathy received the posting order. With his eight-month pregnant wife, he left the same day for a 400 km journey in a taxi. 'There weren't any trains running so I had to hire a car. It took about nine hours,' he says. The Indian Railways never reimbursed the fare, he rues, adding that it was quite a large amount for those days. On reaching Erode, the task was clear. He had to see that a goods train coming from Punjab found its way to Palakkad in Kerala. 'Two drivers and I, we went and managed to run a goods train around 2 am. By the time others woke up and could stop the train, it had gone past.'
Dhasarathy, who had served in the Territorial Army for five years after being enlisted during the 1965 war with Pakistan, when he was barely a month into the Indian Railway service, was against the strike. 'How can a government agency strike for bonus? Bonus is for everybody and not based on actual performance. It can be given to everybody; it is government money, not your money,' he says. The priority was to run goods trains even then, just as in the summer of 2020, since a large number of essentials, such as foodgrain, coal and fertiliser, move by rail. 'Kerala would have starved if we had waited for eight or ten more days. We started running passenger trains within five-six days after that (after running the goods trains).'
For him, it was also crucial to keep the diesel shed operational. 'They told us not to attend to locomotives at the shed. It was not that we were against each other. There were 3,000 people in Erode under my administrative control. I was not a very senior person because I had done just eight or nine years of service (five years in the army and three years in the railways), but railway men generally listen to their boss if they know he is honest and does not mean them ill.' On whether he felt threatened by the supporters of the strike, he said, 'We got an FIR [first information report filed with police] against those four-five people. The Indian Railways also started giving jobs to sons of those employees who did not support the strike.'
It is not, however, entirely true that the railway staff was not largely supportive of the strike. The build-up to the 1974 historic strike, in fact, was disruptive for the Indian Railways. Before the strike, Lalit Narayan Mishra, the then railway minister, lamented frequent disruption of work. 'So far as staff discipline is concerned, this has been a particularly bad year for the Indian Railways. From the very beginning, we have been hit by go-slow, work-to-rule and work-to-designation agitations, mass absenteeism, wildcat strikes, bandhs, squatting on track, etc. While the agitations unconnected with railway operation impeded our working, the effect of employee agitations has been particularly crippling. Among such agitations are the lightning strike of station masters and assistant station masters during April on Western Railway, the successive strikes and agitations by loco running staff in May, July, August and December which affected most of the Zonal Railways and the agitation by staff of Sholapur division on the South Central Railway during August and September,' he noted in his speech of 27 February 1974, more than two months before the strike, while presenting the railway budget for 1974–75.16 Mishra was killed on 2 January 1975 in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway station in Bihar, for which four, including three Ananda Margas (members of the Ananda Marga organization), were sentenced to death much later, in 2014.
A month and a half after Mishra's killing, when Kamalapati Tripathi presented the Railway Budget for 1975–76 on 20 February 1975, he assessed the damage caused by the strike. He noted:
Shortly after the strike was called off, a rapid re-appraisal revealed that in the three months of April to June (1974), 11.8 million tonne of freight traffic had been lost. It was realized that the originating traffic during the year would not exceed 197 million tonne, made up of 173 million tonne of revenue earning traffic and 23.8 million tonne of departmental traffic. Passenger traffic had also declined as the number of passengers carried was nearly 150 million less than in the corresponding period of the previous year. Other coaching earnings had also suffered. Consequently, in the first quarter, railway earnings dropped by Rs 92.45 crore [924.5 million] as compared with the Budget proportion
Fares and freight rates had to be raised 'to recoup the anticipated deficiency of Rs 140 crore [1,400 million] in earnings.'
If the strike had halted railway operations while it was on, it was the shortage of locomotive coal that led to the curtailment of certain passenger trains afterwards. 'The fall in non-suburban passenger traffic beyond the strike-affected period is mainly due to the cancellation of trains. The Hon'ble Members know that faced with the shortage of loco coal, the railway administration had to curtail some of their branch line passenger train services. Now that the production of coal has begun to gather momentum, it should be possible for us to build up our stocks. Subject to this contingency, restoration of cancelled trains will be commenced from the first of March, and progressively increased in the next few months,' said Tripathi in his railway budget speech.
The summer of 2020 was, however, different. Operating trains did not pose a security risk, but a health risk. Besides, it was the government that pulled the chain on passenger trains, even as the Indian Railways kept the freight trains rolling. But the scale of operations is much larger now than at the time of the strike in 1974. The Indian Railways could carry only around 200 million tonnes of freight in 1975, compared to 1.21 billion tonnes annually in 2019–20. It carried 2.7 billion passengers then and 8.4 billion passengers before COVID-19 struck. During the twelve months leading up to March 2021, however, which included two months of national lockdown, it carried a marginally higher freight volume of 1.23 billion tonnes, though passenger traffic fell by about 90 per cent over the normal times.
This time, the Indian Railways first issued instructions to its zones on 21 March that no passenger trains would originate from any railway station in the country from 7 am to 10 pm on 22 March because of the janata curfew announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.21 A press release was issued at 8.14 pm for the same, but it didn't take even twenty-four hours for the Indian Railways to make another announcement, at 1.48 pm on 22 March, that all trains would be stopped till 31 March 2020.
Domestic commercial flights stopped three days later, from 25 March 2020 onwards. This was announced on the evening of 23 March, which meant that unlike in the case of the railways, there was more than a day's notice for air travellers, though it was not much help for those caught away from home, since airlines started bunching flights together and changing schedules at short notice. A three-line statement from the MoCA issued to the media said, 'Airlines have to plan operations so as to land at their destination before 23.59 hours on 24 March 2020.'
There was no clear reason why trains were stopped before domestic air journeys, or why the Union government decided to first pin down the Delhi government by asserting its federal right on aviation matters, overruling the state's decision to shut the Delhi airport on 22 March, and then doing precisely this from 25 March.
This, despite the fact that those travelling by air after a foreign journey or touching down at airports were probably more likely to transmit the infection (because they were coming from outside the country) than those travelling by train. It is true, though, that the number of train travellers and the difficulty of screening passengers at railway stations or in trains was more daunting than at airports.
Opposition leaders claimed that the government wanted to keep running Parliament to make the point that the Madhya Pradesh state assembly could also meet and vote on a no-confidence motion against the Kamal Nath-led Congress government, and that COVID-19 could not come in the way of legislative work. 'It is obvious, Parliament was run only to ensure that the Madhya Pradesh Assembly could run and the Congress government be toppled,' the embittered Nath told media persons later.23 He said the nationwide lockdown was announced a day after the Shivraj Singh Chauhan-led BJP government was installed in Madhya Pradesh. Airlines needed to operate to ferry politicians and legislators.
On 31 March, a Business Standard news analysis said, 'The initial approach followed by the Indian Railways and airlines was to cancel services on those routes where the occupancy was low. For commercial airlines, it did not make sense to fly to, say, China, Italy and Iran, which reported initial COVID-19 casualties, because business travellers had stopped going to these countries anyway. Besides, their staff was risking exposure to the virus by travelling to those destinations.'
The railways, too, had started cancelling low-occupancy trains because of the pandemic. This approach ran contrary to the messages of social distancing, the first rule of which was to avoid crowding. It should not have followed the same approach as the airlines, for two reasons. One, it is the crucial lifeline for long-distance travellers, especially for those who do not have airports in their city or cannot afford flights. Second, it should have ensured that trains were not crowded during the peak period; instead, it could run more trains, just as it does for Holi and Diwali. 'Running two-three trains for four-five days would have saved harassment. It was an unplanned situation,' says Shanti Narain, former member (traffic), Railway Board.
Even the normally efficient DMRC took decisions that dangerously contradicted social distancing norms. On 19 March, it curtailed its services, even though its occupancy was already down by then, since many offices in the NCR had instituted work-from-home protocols. 'This meant that even the smaller numbers of passengers were accommodated in fewer trains. Delhi Metro's average daily ridership is over 5 million,' says the article. The Mumbai suburban train services, which the Indian Railways runs, took a more cautious and gradual approach, perhaps because of the directions from the state government. It first shut air-conditioned services on 20 March, since the COVID-19 infection was more likely to spread in closed spaces. The total number of trains remained the same.
Excerpted with permission from The Great Shutdown: The Story of Two Indian Summers, Jyoti Mukul, HarperCollins India.