छठ की रेल का हाल, कितना बदहाल

Attention, passengers. This is not 'Vande Bharat' but the 'real' Bharat. If you have not paid attention, well...it is your fault. Anyway, this is the railways for you. If you can get on board, well, show us! But before that, passengers, your attention please: Hello, I'm Ravish Kumar. Whenever it is time for migrants to visit home, why does it prove fatal for them? Around Chhath, lakhs are forced to risk their lives to board trains & buses. Even boarding a train after much shoving is perilously c

lose to accident.. While someone crushes their feet, another suffocates. You may feel this is a festive season problem, but when we collected various railway news about common people, a pattern emerged. The number of trains for common people is decreasing. Their trains are increasingly cancelled. The number of general/ sleeper coaches in their trains has decreased. In today's episode, we will string all such reports you may have missed. All year long, migrants work in different states of the cou

ntry. They live away from home. Only Holi and Chhath are give them a chance to visit home & meet their people, but if you look at the way this section of the society has to travel, you will see their condition is terrible. These migrants that somehow push through, had to also return to their villages on foot during Covid. Of them, some perished en route. You might remember that in Maharashtra, migrant labourers were walking along the tracks, they got exhausted & slept there; were crushed to deat

h by a goods train. In this May 2020 incident, 16 people were killed in Aurangabad. Another data has been published in many newspapers. RTI activist Chandra Shekhar Gaur had obtained this information from RTI. According to this, 8700 people died on the tracks during the lockdown of 2020. 8 THOUSAND 7 HUNDRED. And what is happening this time? When lakhs of passengers are off to Bihar and UP to celebrate Chhath, what's happening now? There have been two incidents of fire in two trains within 12 h

ours in Etawah. First, the Darbhanga Express caught fire, Amar Ujala has reported that 8 passengers were injured. Then, a coach of the Vaishali Express caught fire. 19 passengers were injured. The condition of 11 is said to be serious. The accident happened at 2.30 am at night. Most passengers were asleep that time. The fire led to chaos in the coach. Passengers could save their lives only by jumping from the train. This is how people are reaching their homes. Be it Chhath, Holi or Diwali, when

the common man returns home, they look at a train that never appears in media. But when this person stays home, watching routine Vande Bharat flag-off ceremonies on channels, they remain lost in a dreamworld. To ensure they remain in a dream, Vande Bharat videos are peddled regularly. In today's episode, we will see the state of that railways, which is neither shown, nor do you see it anyway. It is easy to forget that in such a huge country, less than 40 Vande Bharat trains exist! Obviously, th

is is not the true reality of the railways. Their trains should first be made 'Vande Bharat', at least, they should have felt valued in this democracy sitting in their trains. But Vande Bharat looks shiny and new, the design is different, so the PM snatches the green flag from the Railway minister to flag them off himself. Ideally, the PM should also flag off the trains run as "special trains" around Chhath/ Holi. To get into one of these is like pushing oneself while holding all one's constitu

tional rights in a bundle. It is tough to differentiate people from goods in these trains. This is the real 'Vande Bharat' which no minister 'worships'. This is the picture which, if it appears in the media at all, quickly disappears. TBH, does not even appear at all. Now there are only two types of railway news. 'Vande Bharat being inaugurated' and 'railway station being refurbished'. Over the past many months, models of various shiny stations have been tweeted on the minister's Twitter handle

. Several thousand crores of rupees are spent on their beautification so that the train station also looks like an airport. 1309 stations are being "developed" as "Amrit Bharat Railway Stations". This Samastipur station, where people are running to board their train, will also become an "Amrit Bharat Railway Station". At present, the target of these people is not to find Amrit, it is to board the coach, but entering is as bad as the Amrit churning struggles. People's lives are like hell, but go

vt's language is overflowing with Amrit, or 'nectar'. These passengers have little hope from the railways. Just make us reach our destination. But the govt wants these people to disappear from its 'development videos'. Do you think that without improving the financial state of train passengers, without improving such trains, a station can become 'Amrit Bharat station'? Then this old mother must wait for the development nectar about to arrive in 2024. After all, why is there is no discussion arou

nd the trains of the general public? The dreams of Vande Bharat/ Bullet Train are being peddled. The number of high speed trains in China is more than 33000. Their speed is reportedly 350 kmph. Here, dreamworlds are being peddled on 40 trains & 1 bullet train! as if the world's first bullet train will run in India. Whenever you look at railway fares and the state of the bogies, the govt circulates Vande Bharat/ Bullet Train videos in public. 5 days ago, the Railway Minister posted a video of the

Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train project. Will the whole of India ride this bullet train? Or travel to Samastipur in this? Why doesn't the minister post a video of passenger train, general coaches, express trains or the improvements, if any, in them?? What we are saying today, is that less than 0.5 % passengers will use Vande Bharat/ Bullet Train, but their story is shown as the full 100%, their dream is said to be the dream of the whole country. It is going to be 10 years of Modi government, even

today, these people somehow sitting in these trains, or planning to travel standing, have only one dream remaining, to find a seat and get through the journey. If you look & discuss the state inside the coach, the entire development model will prove to be hollow or extremely limited. Travel has become expensive and very difficult. The govt must be right that Vande Bharat videos will make people forget the humiliation of the journey. In a decade of media control, its control on people's minds wi

ll be total. The condition of such toilets shows that people have learned the art of control. There is no other way except control or you don't know the whole story. The common traveler now controls their questions, their thoughts have lost their edge. They are exhausted. No one is talking about a common train, or of the seats in trains, or the fares, or dynamic pricing, deductions on cancellation, or, blankets/sheets etc. There's no word on the quality of food, everyone is just in a state of e

cstasy. The reality of common people's train is identical to real India's reality. And this is a specialty of real India. It was like this before 2014, it is the same after 2014. We watched these videos from Ludhiana station repeatedly, to understand if the door was small or the trains were limited. Is it less people or more luggage? Should the luggage go in first or the person? What should a person, the "passenger", pay attention to? How the value of this common citizen goes up, when they're

given free cylinders/ grains/ fans for votes. but when they set out on a journey, life goes beyond their control. In Modi rule's 10 years, WHY did this reality of the previous govts NOT change? In media conclaves, when the Railway Minister is presented as brilliant and smart, why are these videos not played there? Why only Vande Bharat? So everything looks smart? The common man is abandoned to be shoved around; and leaving aside the reality of thousands of trains, less than 40 Vande Bharat train

s have been made the face of Indian Railways. Media has not registered the state in which workers of Surat would reach UP/ Bihar. A large number of people reached Surat station on 11 November. A stampede broke out and 4 people were injured. Virendra Singh of Chhapra died of suffocation. Virendra Singh had gone to the Surat station, where the stampede happened. If it was elections, Modi's Railway Minister would've surely gone to meet his family. People were boarding trains in Surat in these condi

tions. In their thrill of going home on Chhath, they forgot that the Vande Bharat that the PM was flagging off is not for them, and its number is less than 40 anyway. According to media reports, all the trains going from Surat to Bihar and UP were packed. The waiting list exceeded 300. They had to go home somehow, even risking their lives. So people tried to board the trains. Those who did not have reservation also started boarding the train thinking they had to get home somehow. In this chaos,

some lost their luggage while others could not board the train at all. It is difficult to differentiate between general and sleeper coaches. Bhaskar has written that a huge crowd was also seen at the bus stand. The ratio of passengers to trains is very poor. It is possible, the number of trains from Surat is small but is the number of trains in Prayagraj, UP also small? This news is from around Diwali. Bhaskar has written that 400 passengers boarded a 72-seater coach; People in Prayagraj going

home for Diwali are getting no space in trains and buses. That's why we say that Vande Bharat is not the face of Indian Railways. This train is being used to hide the real face of Indian Railways. The PM describes Vande Bharat very minutely as the aspiration of 140 crore Indians, but from this video, you can guess that not only Vande Bharat, but Indian Railways has failed in meeting the aspiration of crores of Indians . On Sept 24, the PM had flagged off 9 Vande Bharats via video conferencing.

On this occasion he said that: “This is an unprecedented opportunity to expand modern connectivity in the country. "This speed and scale of infrastructure development is exactly matching the aspirations of 140 crore Indians. "And this is what today's India wants. "These are the aspirations of the youth, entrepreneurs, women, professionals, businessmen and people in employment of the new India.” Vande Bharat fare is quite expensive. More than the super fast trains running on the same tracks. Obv

iously, this train is for the rich and in this country the rich are only 1%. The rest of the people do not even earn Rs 25,000 a month, so how can Vande Bharat be the aspiration of 140 crore people? Has Rajdhani, Shatabdi become the aspiration of 140 crore people? Could even these trains meet the aspirations of 140 crore people? When these could not, then how (and when??) will Vande Bharat? Times of India's Atul Thakur reported on November 15 that the passenger train, which ran at 47.6 kmph last

year, ran at a speed of 42.3 km/h between April–September this year. They have... wfi... slowed down! against last year, there has been a 4.9 kmph decline in the average speed of passenger trains in Northern Railway. The speed of goods trains has also decreased. Between April–Sept last year, the average speed of goods trains was 31.7 kmph. This year it reduced to 25.8 km/h. In the New Indian Express dt Sept 30 2023, B Anbuselvan reported that with the advent of Vande Bharat, the superfast is sl

owing down. As per the new timetable, after the launch of Tirunelveli-Chennai VB, the Chennai-Madurai-Vaigai Express time will go up 15 min from October 1, its speed will go down. During the trust vote in the Lok Sabha, NCP MP Supriya Sule had asked: what do we do with Vande Bharat, when local & passenger trains through her constituency have gone missing? She said not a single train stops at three stations in her constituency. The farmers/ labourers who could travel in Garib Rath to Pune earlie

r, can no longer do so. Did you know that train-cancellations are an issue in Chhattisgarh elections too? In Sept, Rahul Gandhi traveled from Raipur to Bilaspur by train. This also had a political objective. Through this trip, Rahul wanted to raise the question that, many trains are being canceled in Chhattisgarh due to which the common man is very troubled. In August 2023, Bhupesh Baghel had written a letter to PM Modi, saying that Railways is canceling trains without any info, due to which the

passengers of Chhattisgarh are facing problems. Besides, trains are also running late. On Sept 25, he had told journalists that the common passenger cannot use Vande Bharat, as the fare is very high. Most of the people travel by passenger trains but they are being discontinued. The Hindu Business Line and Business Standard reported on the matter in July this year. In the South East Central zone, 67,000 trains have been canceled/ suspended in 3 years. Bilaspur, Nagpur and Raipur divisions come i

n this zone. We searched for newspapers reports from Chhattisgarh on the train cancellations. 2 months ago, Bhaskar reported that Railways canceled 10 trains; Trains affected from October 2–20, more than 75 trains canceled every week. MORE than 75 trains CANCELED every week. 3 months ago, Bhaskar reported that 14 Chhattisgarh trains were cancelled. Trains to Bilaspur, Raigarh, Korba, Raipur and Gondia will not run from Aug 6–10. On Aug 26, Navbharat Times reported that these 21 trains will be ca

nceled during festivals. Amar Ujala reported on 29 Sept: 37 Chhattisgarh trains stand cancelled, & routes of many changed. How easily it was forgotten that so many trains were regularly canceled in 1 state. The Hindu reported on 11 Oct 2023 that Congress spokesperson Sushil Anand Shukla said that 64 trains have been canceled in Chhattisgarh in 20 days, and 64000 trains in the last 3 years. Why are so many trains canceled in Chhattisgarh, – all these cancelled trains concern common people – when,

as per Business Standard, it is one of the most profitable zones? How many discussions have happened on this topic? Not once. Where have the common person's trains disappeared? Why are they being suspended or cancelled? What happened to the short distance trains, that were a part of common life? The govt should say how many new trains have expanded in this segment. Hence, do NOT see the problems around Chhath as a seasonal problem. Amar Ujala in February this year said that sleeper coaches are

being cut in 44 trains; the fare will be more than twice dearer. This includes Gorakhdham Express, Chaurichaura Express, Shalimar Express, Gorakhpur-Pun Express, Gorakhpur-Yesvantpur Express etc. The report stated that instead of 5-6 sleeper coaches running now, there will only be 2 coaches. This means that at least 300 -400 passengers in each train will HAVE to travel in AC coaches instead of sleeper or general. Reportedly, AC coaches will be increased in number by cutting sleeper/ general co

aches. But there's no answer if a sleeper coach passenger, can afford the AC coach fare or not. Have they become rich too? The newspaper reported that Gorakhdham Express's sleeper fare from Gorakhpur to New Delhi is Rs 445, the AC-3 coach fare is Rs 1165. This is the online ticket fare. As such, passengers will have to pay more than double the fare. Have you noticed that sleeper/ general coaches are being cut in many trains? You are being forced to travel in AC coaches by paying double the fare,

and you spend a lot of money even before you reach home for the festival? Or risk your life to travel from Delhi to Motihari/ Madhubani/ Darbhanga in buses where the general class is crammed in the other way. It cannot be seen at the stations but can be seen inside these buses. We have reported on these buses in an earlier video in detail. Have you ever wondered why such long distance buses ply from Delhi–Darbhanga? Why not trains? Have trains been reduced or the number of coaches reduced? Do y

ou know how many sleeper/ general coaches were cut in the last 10 years? There was a time when there were special correspondents for railway stories. There would be detailed discussions after rail budgets. You used to get information through them, imagine how big a part of your life railways is, but news related to it have vanished. We can't confirm it ourselves, but Balram Vishwakarma has tweeted on Twitter. Balram has given a breakup of dynamic-pricing for AC-2 from Mumbai to Patna. He says th

at the: base fare is Rs 2950, but the dynamic fare on top of that is Rs 5900. This way, the AC-2 fare goes to Rs 9300. Balram states that the sleeper coach fare is Rs 2625, the fare of 3rd economy is Rs 6335; and AC-3 fare is Rs 6655. Is this government pro-people? Now you can see that Lapdog Media and Vande Bharat both do identical work. To keep you away from the reality of railways. To not let their story appear on TV, who travelled by train before, but the trains in their region are now stopp

ed and exorbitantly priced. When you join the links through these reports, and go to the station, you will see why 'special trains' are so crowded. What do these people with freighted shoulders know, that coaches have been reduced in the older trains, or trains cut altogether? Maybe that pressure is also visible here. This video shows two stations of Delhi. There are more arrangements here compared to other places. Security forces are deployed and counters are set up to offer assistance, but thi

s arrangement is not related to the availability of trains. It is clear that the number of trains is less than required. A press release of the Railway Ministry on 23 October states that 283 special trains will be run. The number of trips of these trains is said to be more than 4000. Even after this, the waiting list is very long, the condition of general coach is bad and the people's journeys, painful. In the name of 'system', they are queued up to board the train, but everyone knows what the c

ondition of the coach is. We don't know whether the special trains reach on time or how delayed they get? On Twitter, only a few passengers have written about particular trains that it is running late by 10 hours or 11 hours. Railways has not been evaluated properly in these 10 years of Modi rule. Maitri Porecha's report was published in The Hindu in June this year. About 1 lakh 42 thousand passenger trains have been delayed in 2022-23. Due to their delay, time equivalent to 14 years has been lo

st. This is the value of the common man's time. How much money would he have lost due to arriving late? Govt will not evaluate that, and in blinded by religion, people too won't. Most people traveling around Chhath work in the unorganized sector. Somehow they get leave and a major part of it is spent in the train journey. As if their life has no value. Even the government does not deem their life to be valuable and sadly, people don't understand the value of their lives and time either. Bye, I a

m Ravish Kumar.