THE 1830S: INCEPTION

The fascinating story behind the start of the railways in India

The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry.’ Many will be familiar with this quotation from Karl Marx. They may not necessarily remember where Marx wrote this and when. His observation is from a piece titled ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’. A more complete extract is the following:

The millocracy have discovered that the transformation of India into a reproductive country has become of vital importance to them, and that, to that end, it is necessary; above all, to gift her with means of irrigation and of internal communication.

They intend now drawing a net of railroads over India . . . I know that the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication.

You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow I the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways.

The railway-system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindoos are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labor, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.

Ample proof of this fact is afforded by the capacities and expertness of the native engineers in the Calcutta mint, where they have been for years employed in working the steam machinery by the natives attached to the several steam engines in the Burdwan coal districts, and by other instances.

When did Karl Marx write this piece? He wrote it on 22 July 1853, though it was first published on 8 August 1853. 1853 is important because that’s the official date-16 April, to be precise-for the start of the railways in India, and Marx must have known about this.

(Thus, in the centennial year in 1953, a postage stamp was issued to celebrate the occasion.)
Railway development was relatively new in 1853—not just in India, but everywhere in the world.

Therefore, expectations about what the railways would do for economic development, industrial progress and productivity were no more than, well, expectations. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that, compared with what happened in many other countries in the world, India’s railway development didn’t quite bring those benefits—the benefits that economists refer to as ‘positive externalities’.

‘Conceptually there is a strong case for channeling resources to transport infrastructure in India given the widely known spillover effects of transport networks to link markets, reduce a variety of costs, boost agglomeration economies, and improve the competitiveness of the economy especially manufacturing which tends to be logistics-intensive.’

This is a quotation not from 1853, but from the government of India’s 2014—15 Economic Survey. If this was being said in February 2015, presumably the expectations of 1853 had fallen somewhat short. There were two reasons for this, both rather sweeping statements. First, freight was neglected, and the emphasis was on passengers. Second, major geographical parts of the country were bypassed in the process of railway development.

In 1953, the centennial year of Indian! Railways, India issued a postage stamp to celebrate the occasion. But the date 1853 is both right and wrong; the postage stamp is both right and wrong. At 3.35 p.m., on 16 April 1853, flagged off with a twenty—one-gun salute, a train with fourteen railway carriages and 400 guests left Bori Bunder for Thane (then Tannah).

With three steam locomotives (Sindh, Sultan and Sahib) it took one hour and fifteen minutes to make the journey Bori Bunder station is no longer fused. Anon-stop EMU (electric multiple unit) train from Chhatrapati, Shivaji Terminus to Thane still takes fifty-seven minutes!

The Bori Bunder——Tannah journey of 16 April 1953 was the first commercial passenger service, but not the first train in the country Karl Marx clearly knew this, since he talked about steam engines in the Burdwan coal districts. But IR (Indian Railways) decided to celebrate its centenary year in 1953.

It must be placed on record that no photograph exists of the 1853 journey. And the reader should keep in mind that any photograph or postage stamp purportedly showing that train should have pictured three engines, not one. No one seems to know what happened to the locomotives Sahib and Sultan. They just vanished. Sindh was luckier.

The locomotive was last seen on a plinth at what used to be the Byculla office of GIPR (Great Indian Peninsula Railway). Sindh was brought to Delhi by Indian Railways later, but no one knows what happened to Sindh thereafter.

The 1953 fare from Bombay to Thane was Rs 2 and 10 annas for first class travel, Re 1 and 1 anna for a second class ticket, and 5 annas and 3 pice for the third class. However, this was for the subsequent journeys, and not for that first train ride in April 1853.

Since all 400 passengers were invited VIPs, including Lady Falkland, wife of the governor of Bombay, they probably paid nothing. An apocryphal story tells us that the governor, Lord Falkland, didn’t think the railway line was a terribly good idea, and wasn’t part of the entourage.

Extracted from ‘Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry’ by Bibek Debroy, Published by Penguin