An Indecisive Indian

  Disclaimer: What I write today is a modified version of this blog: https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-great-irms-hoopla-from-backbones-to.html Four years ago, the Indian Railways Management Service (IRMS) was launched with great fanfare, its ambition pitched as high as a mountain peak: to fuse eight quarrelsome railway services into one harmonious brotherhood and finally banish the ancient ghost of departmentalism . But the lofty vision soon sprouted cracks wide enough to run a Bullet train through without slowing down. After a circus of somersaults that would make seasoned acrobats weep with professional envy, the government hit the reset button and returned to the familiar embrace of separate Civil and Engineering Services Examinations (CSE and ESE) for induction of officers—an old habit burnished as a breathtaking innovation. And to crown the absurdity, the buzzword IRMS —a term that somehow meant everything and nothing—was not retired but triumphantly retain...

  When news surfaced that China had tested its new-generation CR450 trains, social media went into hyperdrive. Facts and fiction whizzed past each other faster than the trains themselves. The wildest claim? That China had achieved a speed of 896 kmph. Well, no — this isn’t a MagLev. The CR450 runs on wheels, and wheels doing 896 kmph would be less “train” and more “missile on holiday”. In reality, the 896 kmph was the combined relative speed when two CR450s crossed paths during testing; the highest actual speed clocked was 453 kmph. Still, the train’s planned operating speed of 400 kmph will make it the fastest wheel-on-rail service on Earth. (China’s record-holding 432 kmph MagLev, after all, floats above the rails.) Even at 400 kmph, the feat is awe-inspiring — and, for us Indians, a little painful. For while China streaks ahead, our own Mumbai–Ahmedabad High-Speed Rail (HSR) project has spent nearly a decade still trying to leave the station. While India had debated and ...

  I recently wrote in this blog, https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2025/09/awarded-rewarded-and-thoroughly.html that there are many folks like me, sporting a few half-plucked feathers in our caps, who periodically get invited to be both honoured and humiliated at the same time. Honours for lesser mortals like me are like confetti, pretty, harmless, and soon swept away or worse still, like those glittery party-balloons that hover for a while, bobbing smugly above your head, and then, at the precise moment you try to look dignified, they slip, explode, and leave you with a face full of helium and the smell of fried samosas. My many experiences involved an invitation to be both bedizened and bemused, lauded and at once mortified in public, a ceremonial two-step I’ve come to call “the garlanded casualty” waltz, a dance I now perform with the grace of an arthritic ballerina and the resignation of a government file. I have, therefore, with time, become a trifle philosophical too an...

  India’s logistics ecosystem sits at a pivotal juncture. The National Logistics Policy (NLP), launched in September 2022, was designed to transform the sector from a costly, fragmented system into an integrated, technology-driven network, aiming to reduce logistics costs from 13–14 per cent to 8 per cent of GDP by 2030, thereby boosting trade competitiveness, productivity, and employment. Complementing this has been the PM Gati Shakti National Master Plan (2021), which seeks to knit multiple modes of transport into a seamless grid of connectivity, anchored by multimodal logistics parks and coordinated infrastructure planning.   Indian Railways (IR), by far the greenest and most energy-efficient mode, was expected to be the backbone of this transformation. Policy targets such as raising the rail share of freight from 27 to 45 per cent, doubling average freight speeds from 25 to 50 km/h, and achieving 3,000 million tonnes of originating loading by 2027 were embedded in the ...