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The Pattern of Railway Development in India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Daniel Thorner
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Extract

India alone of the countries with great railway networks is unindustrialized. In the other leading railway powers—particularly the United States, Russia, Germany, though to a lesser extent in sparsely settled areas like Canada and Australia—the railway was the veritable dynamo of the Industrial Revolution. It has had no such effect in India, even though the country's network by 1947 was 40,500 miles long, counting only first-line main track, or 57,000 miles long, counting just about everything. I propose to sketch the setting in which railways were brought to India and then to review the 75 years of argument and experiment as to which form of enterprise (public, private, or some combination of the two) was best suited to India's railway development. I shall attempt to give a picture of the absolute and comparative magnitude of the Indian railway system as of 1947, and to discuss its economic and historical significance for Britain and for India.

Type
Symposium—The Patterns of Railway Development
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , February 1955 , pp. 201 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1955

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References

1 The partition of Britain's former Indian Empire in 1947 raised many special problems which affected the railways as well as other fields. The coverage of this article is limited, therefore, mainly to the period 1849–1947.

2 India in 1947 comprised an area 17 times larger than British Guiana and a population 800 times more numerous.

3 This paragraph owes much to the striking remarks of Jenks, Leland H., Migration of British Capital to 1875 (New York, 1927)Google Scholar, Ch. VII.

4 A letter to the Right Honourable Lord John Russell, M. P. … on the subject of Indian Railways (London, 1848)Google Scholar, as cited in my book, Investment in Empire: British Railway and Steam Shipping Enterprise in India, 1825–1849 (Philadelphia, 1950), 151–52.Google Scholar

5 Details of the basic railway contract may be found in Investment in Empire, op. cit., Ch. VII.

6 Colonel Chesney, author of Indian Polity (London, 1894)Google Scholar, as quoted by Sanyal, N., Development of Indian Railways (Calcutta, 1930), 79.Google Scholar

7 Details on these and related matters may be found in my article, “Great Britain and the Development of India's Railways,” Journal of Economic History (New York, Fall, 1951), 389–402.Google Scholar

8 From this period interference by Indians with the “alien” railways became a customary mode of political and personal expression. Such interference ranged from widespread nonpurchase of tickets for rail travel, to sitting on the tracks to prevent trains from moving, and to physical destruction not only of rolling stock but of entire marshalling yards. The tradition of interference with the railways has passed on from British India to the current Republic of India. Demonstrators blocking railways played an important part in 1953 in: he establishment of a separate state of Andhra.

9 The sources for these data are the Government of India, Ministry of Railways, Report by the Railway Board on Indian Railways for 1946–47, 2 vols. (Delhi, 1948)Google Scholar; Energy Resources of the World (Washington, D. C: Department of State Publication 3428, 1949)Google Scholar; and Point Four (Washington, D. C: Department of State Publication 3719, January 1950)Google Scholar. The per capita consumption of energy figures cited above cover both railways and local bunkers.

10 See the relevant chapter and bibliography in the symposium edited by Brown, W. Norman, India, Pakistan, Ceylon (Cornell University Press, 1951).Google Scholar