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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Those who stand and wait-Sreelatha Menon

Those who stand and wait-Sreelatha Menon

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published Published on Mar 1, 2013   modified Modified on Mar 1, 2013
-The Business Standard

For some people, travelling by train to their village 1,400 km away is a journey through hell. These are people who travel unreserved. Their suffering is all the more traumatic for being symbolic of the apathy of those who run the trains and the country.

Saraswati Mondal, an illiterate domestic worker in Delhi, going to Murshidabad by Kalka Mail goes to New Delhi station, walks into a crowd of many more migrants like her, all bound for Howrah, buys a ticket in the general compartment and is ready to go standing in the crowded train. She says she would be lucky to find a seat by evening.

Her reason to go unreserved is that she does not know how to get it reserved.  

Sangeeta Chirkita, a domestic worker in Delhi, travels regularly between Ranchi and Delhi in unreserved compartments, paying about Rs 270 for the 30 hour journey. She stands almost throughout the journey in crowded trains like Utkal Express and Tata Muri especially on her way home.

People travelling in these unreserved compartments don't have to fill in forms, mentioning place or date or names of passengers or address....They just have to reach the station on the day of departure, go to the counter meant for unreserved compartments, and get a ticket across the counter by paying the necessary amount, usually nothing in comparison with what is paid for the reserved compartments.

The reason why many of them go in unreserved is not only their poverty, but also the fact that they are illiterate, and not capable of filling up forms to get proper reserved tickets. About 200 people huddled together in a coach meant for 72 people are migrant labourers, or their kinsmen coming from the villages... women, aged persons with no exposure to buying railway tickets. If a train has 22 coaches, four of them are usually kept for unreserved passengers. So while about 1,300 travel in the 18 coaches, 800 travel in these four.

The sight of these coaches points to the fact that the whole process of booking tickets is anti-illiterate and anti-women or plain discriminatory. And that makes the whole Railways discriminatory too.

Standing alongwith Sangeeta in the queue, one meets almost every one the Government of India or any state in India claims to care for..the poorest of the poor, the real aam admi.

Some are applicants or beneficiaries of Indira Awas Yojana, some of the mid-day meals, some of the NREGA, some have been getting subsidised food grains at ration shops or are eligible for it. Almost all of them are people the Government is eager to capture in its network of Aadhar identification regime and do some sort of money transfer in the run up to the elections.

Sangeeta herself is a scheduled-tribe person, a widow, besides a sixth-standard drop out hailing from a Naxal-hit village in Gumla district of Jharkhand.

One should consider them the pampered class going by the fact that almost all the  programmes of the Government are usually meant for them.

So how do they travel?

It is worse than how animals travel  to the abattoir. When Mahatma Gandhi was once thrown out of a railway compartment by a white official in a train in South Africa for being black, many of us were not around. Well, history repeats itself every day in the trains run by Indian Railways, in these unreserved compartments. They hold less than a tenth of the space the whole train has and yet these coaches carry nearly half the passengers that travel in the whole train.
 
While the Government professes to create programmes for their poverty alleviation, the railway budgets cast a blind eye to the humiliation and indignity in which three quarters of the population has to  travel. There is no proposal to run special unreserved trains for migrants. The  Railways started Garib Raths but these have no space for the 'garib'. Ideally the entire train should have been kept unreserved to benefit the masses.  

Recently, National Alliance of People's Movements led by Medha Patkar wrote to the Railway Minister about the inequity and discrimination to which railway passengers were being subjected to and appealed to him to end it.
 
"Our major plea is to bridge the gap between the common people travelling by general class compartments and others. The data from the Railway Clearly indicate that nearly 45-50 per cent of people travel in unreserved class but the space allotted to them is only 16-17 per cent only. So, it can be said that in one compartment of general bogey, 3 persons travel in space meant for one person, which is totally inhuman. Hence, there is an urgent need to enhance the number of general compartments, particularly in Mail / Express trains."  

Bansal said in his budget speech today how there were 12,335 passenger trains now. But he was silent on the bulk of the passengers who were going to use these trains.
 
Bansal announced several new trains today but he did not mention a single one that was meant only for unreserved passengers.
It is not that people travelling in unreserved compartments dont pay for their travel. But somehow their money does not seem to count for the Railways.

And in that case should the Railways be entitled to charge anything at all from these passengers since they don't seem to figure in its scheme of things?

And the other option for the Government that claims to be inclusive, is to stop doing schemes like Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and Food Security Bill, giving food for Rs 2 a kilo too. Since these people don't exist for the Government, then why spend money on ghosts?

The Business Standard, 26 February, 2013, http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/those-who-stand-and-wait-113022600415_1.html


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