Around the world railway travel is considered to be the cheapest and most comfortable in which there is no need to rush to the bus stations nor have to reach the airport hours in advance to travel by plane but through train only arriving at the appointed time the passengers can off to their destination within a few minutes.
That is the reason why most of the travelers in modern countries like Europe, China and Japan still travel by train. If look at the South Asian countries, railways system of neighboring India is considered to be the most profitable public service. The main reason is that there are facilities available to passengers in railway cars.
When National Railways is evaluated in comparison with that, it is suffering from insufficiency like other government departments and it is increasing day by day. Yesterday the railway department restored the Awami Express from Peshawar to Karachi, which is good news for the travelers who were pushed in the buses.
According to railway officials Awami Express has been dispatched from Cantt Railway Station to Karachi. According to an esteemed daily newspaper officials said that the train will reach Karachi in 35 hours with 360 passengers. Awami Express has a capacity of 1500 passengers and the fare has been fixed at Rs 4,000 per passenger.
The railway officials said that Awami Express service was stopped in August 2022 due to floods. It should be remembered that earlier many other rail cars have been closed owing to limited resources and losses due to which passengers coming and going to Sindh or Punjab are facing severe difficulties.
Apart from that traders and industrialists are also facing difficulties due to the reduction in the traffic of goods-carrying rail cars. It should be remembered that in the modern world, the railway car is not only being used for the transportation of passengers but it has been made a means of business where people do business in the moving car.
For that, the example of the brotherly country China can be given, where a slow train is run between several large regions, with the aim of providing passengers with the opportunity to do business during the journey and this experience of China has been successfully continued for the last thirty years.
However the speed of their pure passenger rail cars is more than 300 kilometers per hour, due to which passengers prefer the train to the plane. Therefore it is necessary to upgrade Pakistan Railways not only to add more cars but also to upgrade the track to increase their speed because high speed vehicles cannot be run on that tumble-down track. For this purpose Pakistan has a proposed project of M1, which is to be completed under the CPEC but this project has been slowed down for many years due to the laziness of the political governments.
Although the Chinese authorities have said many times that they want to complete this project as soon as possible but administrative weaknesses and frequent changes of governments are making hurdles. Experts says that unless the railway system in the country is not updated, affordable facilities cannot be provided to passengers and businessmen, unless there is an increase in high-speed passenger and freight cars in the country, Inflation should not be reduced.
Therefore the higher authorities have to work firm to transform the railways into a profitable and useful enterprise. It is hoped that any incoming government will start work on M1 project of railways without any delay. If there is a stubborn behavior in this regard, then like PIA, the railways will also have to be put under private custody which will be harmful for the country and the nation because the more institutions are given in private custody, the country will suffer from economic crisis that will put more burden on the masses.
Although our experts consider privatization as the best solution to run the institutions in a better way but they do not think that this privatization is successful in those countries where the economic conditions of the common people are better than Pakistan. They don’t put the entire burden on the people by depending on the IMF, but they are provided with relief in every substance at the official level.
