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Ranjit Singh
Since the creation of the Central Organisation for Railway Electrification headquartered at Allahabad and the hordes of contractors and vendors it supports, lobbying gets intense every year as the day for presenting the railway budget approaches, and this year has been no exception.
In the same league as gauge conversion, electrification of rail routes has of late come to be considered a status symbol, and no MP or MLA worth his salt would ever miss an opportunity to actively pursue such a plum project for his constituency. Apart from the tag of modernisation and progress, which unfortunately it has come to signify, projects like gauge conversion or electrification involve fat contracts and jobs for the vast army of unemployed of the region covered. The fact that it invariably would contribute to a freight and passenger tariff hike is seldom considered a constraint, and never debated by the decision-makers.
This time round, Punjab is determined to stake its claim to a piece of the electrification pie byaggressively lobbying for a Rs 77-crore project to electrify the Ludhiana-Amritsar section.
In their efforts, the clinching argument of defence needs has been trotted out by the lobbyists even though the system is highly vulnerable to sabotage.
With over 14,000 km out of the total 43,000 km of the BG track route having been electrified, a substantial portion of the power generation all over India stands committed to the electrified routes of IR. Resultantly, since the agriculture sector invariably enjoys a higher priority, industries and domestic consumers are the losers and very often end up facing frequent power-cuts in even some of the power-rich states. Apart from suffering serious disruption in their production schedules, quite a few small industries are being increasingly forced to set up captive and often inefficient power plants, pushing up the cost of their products beyond the competitive range.
Reportedly, 5000mw of power is being generated by 'gensets', to which an estimated 16,000mw may beadded in the next five years. Thus, the nation ends up paying more for using precious diesel fuel much less efficiently and contributing to higher levels of pollution.
Each 5000 HP electric locomotive entering service ends up siphoning off about 10mw of generating capacity from the national grid. On the other hand, a diesel locomotive does not draw an iota of electric energy from the various power grids and is, in fact, a virtual power house on wheels, converting fossil fuel directly into locomotion. In the case of electric traction, this process is carried out in three stages, the first converting thermal energy into electricity, the second transmitting it through the overhead lines, and the third converting into mechanical energy.
The diesel loco carries out the first and the third operations on-board more efficiently, eliminating the second operation. It is no surprise that against a generation of about 22 gross tonne kilometres (GTKMs)--a measure of transportation--per million calories of the fossilfuel consumed by an electric locomotive, a diesel unit generates over 30 GTKMs, almost 33 per cent higher.
It is often mistakenly argued that in comparison to the diesels, electric traction is more energy efficient, has lower running and maintenance costs and the service reliability of electric locos is better. Half-baked experts glibly brush aside the argument about cost of electrification as being only marginally capital intensive, and maintain that it is more modern and hence less labour intensive. The crowning argument is that foreign exchange outflow in the case of diesel traction is very high, and hence, it should be phased out at the earliest.
The outlay towards diesel fuel and electric energy for 1996-97 was Rs 1,514 crore for diesel traction, which is substantially lower than Rs 2,222 crore for electric traction, whereas both the tractions carried equal traffic. This gap may rise to nearly Rs 1,000 crore in the current year.
The argument that electrification will reduce import bill does nothold good any longer, since with liberalisation, even high-grade coal is being freely imported by many thermal stations, in particular, on the western and southern coasts. The proposed string of power houses, namely, Enron at Dabhol and Cogentrix in Karnataka are being increasingly based on imported fuel.
Most equipment for the new private ventures for power generation on the anvil is likely to be imported, rendering hollow the argument that forex outflow for diesel oil is a major constraint for operating diesel traction. On the other hand, the ongoing march of rail electrification has over the years resulted in a proliferation of scores of diesel-generating sets, guzzling oil in an inefficient way, to serve the industries starved of electric power.
Almost 50 years ago, some of the US railroads had made a bold attempt to electrify their heavy density routes, but found the capital costs too high and not remunerative.
Furthermore, the electric locomotives were restricted in their field of operation andwere not able to meet the levels of flexibility provided by the fleet of high-powered diesel locomotives working in multiple units. For the hard-nosed commercial enterprises, the higher unit cost of operation was totally unacceptable and from a peak of 863 units in 1944, the last of the electric locomotive was phased out by 1980. Moreover, restriction on moving dimensions imposed by the overhead electric wires does not permit double-decker operation of containers, which has been the bread and butter of business for the US railroads, and could offer higher productivity in rail transport in India too.
However, thanks to electrification, we are now stuck with a clearance of only about 14'-6" from rail level on the major trunk routes on which not only moving double-stacked container trains is ruled out, even transport of the new 9' high ISO containers can be undertaken only at restricted speeds. This leaves the railways with a severe handicap in contributing to the movement of more international containertraffic in the interests of the nation's overall economy and growth.
Now that the exercise for the railway budget is underway, time is perhaps opportune to reconsider actual benefits derived, if any, learn from the experience of the US railroads, look into the severe constraints imposed on flexibility of operations, and put a cap on further electrification for at least a decade, or till the power scenario improves substantially. These hard decisions cannot be delayed any more if the vital agriculture and industrial sectors are not to be denied minimal needs of electrical energy for sustained growth.
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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