A Different Track From Start

But India boarded it differently. In England, Europe, and America, the railway was, first and foremost, a machine for moving goods; passengers rode almost as an afterthought on a freight-centric network. In India, the emphasis inverted. 

A vast, dense, poor, and profoundly mobile population — pilgrims, migrants, soldiers, traders, families — made the Indian railway passenger-centric to a degree the West never knew. For a full century, the train was not merely the best way to cross the subcontinent; for most Indians it was the only mechanised way. That near-monopoly on mobility is what earned the Railways the moniker they still cherish: the Lifeline of the Nation.

The lifeline is fraying. Measure it however you like, the direction is the same. In passenger-kilometres — the yardstick transport economists prefer — the Railways today carry, by official reckoning, about 18% of all the travel Indians do. NITI Aayog’s February 2026 report Scenarios Towards Viksit Bharat and Net Zero puts the national modal split at road roughly 78%, rail — counting the metro, itself an urban railway — about 18, and air 4%, out of some 6,410 billion passenger-kilometres a year. 

By other, narrower cuts — counting journeys rather than distance, or measured against road alone as an earlier PRS analysis did for 2011-12 — rail’s share has been put nearer a 10th. Whichever number one takes, the verdict is identical: the mode that once was Indian travel is now a junior partner in it.

The Railways’ Own Existential Trap

The first cause is internal, and it is a cruel paradox — the Railways are simultaneously too crowded and too empty. Too crowded because a traveller who wants a confirmed reserved berth on a popular route, in a festival week or a wedding season, routinely cannot get one; waitlists run into the hundreds, and the reserved sleeper and AC segment — the paying, discretionary traveller the Railways most need to keep — is chronically rationed. Too empty because in its share of the nation’s travel, the mode is shrinking. The network runs some 13,000-odd passenger trains a day and moves well over 2 crore people daily, yet its coach fleet remains about 70% non-AC, and reserved capacity has simply not expanded at the pace of aspiration.

The Railways know this, and their answer has been the new-generation train — Vande Bharat and the Amrit Bharat — alongside a record output of general and non-AC coaches (4,838 in the latest year) pitched at the ordinary traveller. These are welcome, visible and genuinely faster. But they are being added to a system still hobbled by the same disease diagnosed on the freight side: a mixed network where average speeds crawl, a cross-subsidy that keeps ordinary fares politically frozen, while the service quality they buy erodes, and an investment pattern that has favoured a few showcase corridors over the workaday reserved capacity most Indians actually need. The passenger who cannot get a confirmed berth does not wait for the next Vande Bharat. He books a bus, or he flies.

Highway Comes of Age

The second force is the one the Railways handed the field to — the road. When rail ceded freight to the truck, it also, quietly, ceded the passenger to the bus. Two decades of highway building — the Golden Quadrilateral, the relentless expansion of national highways, the removal of state check-posts after GST — turned the long-distance road journey from an ordeal into a genuine alternative. And the bus that runs on those highways is no longer the bone-rattling state-transport relic of memory. It is air-conditioned, it is a sleeper, increasingly, it is a double-decker AC sleeper with reclining berths, live tracking, and a mobile boarding pass.

The numbers confirm the shift. According to RedBus’s BusTrack report for the second half of 2025-26 (October 2025 to March 2026), intercity bus passenger volumes on the platform rose 24% year on year to 147 million journeys, worth ₹142 billion in ticketing. Air-conditioned buses now account for 72% of journeys, up from 67 a year earlier; sleeper coaches make up 52%; and — this is the dagger aimed straight at the train — routes longer than 250 km accounted for 64% of the mix. The bus is no longer competing for the short hop; it is winning the overnight, multi-hundred-kilometre journey that was rail’s heartland. 

With nearly 6,900 private operators reaching over 12,500 towns — well above the 9,274 commercial railway stations managed by Indian Railways — the organised bus has done to the passenger what the truck did to freight: offered door-to-door reliability the train cannot match.

Democratisation Of The Sky

India is now the world’s third-largest domestic aviation market. In calendar 2025, India’s domestic carriers flew 16.69 crore passengers, up from 16.13 crore in 2024 — a figure that would have been unimaginable a generation ago, when flying was the preserve of the expense-account traveller.

The decisive change is that flying stopped being elite. The government’s regional connectivity scheme, UDAN — Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik — has by the Civil Aviation Ministry’s October 2025 count carried over 1.56 crore passengers on 649 routes, operationalising 93 airports, heliports and water aerodromes and running some 3.23 lakh flights. The number of operational airports has risen from 74 in 2014 to 163 in 2025. 

The resident of a tier-two or tier-three town who a decade ago had one realistic way to reach a distant metro — a long train journey, often unreserved — now often has a fare-capped flight from a nearby airport that a bus cannot rival on time and the train cannot rival on either time or, increasingly, on the certainty of a seat. When the sky opens to the aam nagrik, aviation begins to compete for the very traveller — premium, time-sensitive, willing to pay — that the Railways most need to keep.

The segment that defines inter-city rail has not grown in 10 years, though the population and the economy have. The train is still adding the daily commuter; it is the long-distance traveller it cannot add which is going to the bus in droves.

How Air Is Catching Up

Domestic aviation flew 16.69 crore in 2025, and the government’s own target is 30 crore by 2030. Even if air hits that mark, and even if AC rail grows at a fraction of its recent pace, the Railways’ air-conditioned classes — past 50 crore by 2030 — will still carry far more Indians than the aeroplane. The middle class that once rode sleeper is trading up into AC, not out to the sky. 

Where aviation truly gains is in passenger-kilometres — each flyer travels far further — and at the very top, the first-AC traveller for whom a flight now costs less time and often little more money. 

On dense corridors, for the daily commuter, and for the price-sensitive long-distance traveller, nothing moves people as cheaply or as cleanly per kilometre as rail — which is precisely why NITI Aayog’s own net-zero arithmetic needs rail’s passenger share to rise, not fall, if India is to decarbonise its mobility. 

The tragedy is that the policy, the pricing freedom, passenger amenities and the capital have not followed that logic.

Reclaiming The Lifeline

The cross-subsidy that freezes fares while starving the quality of service must be unwound, so that the reserved-class passenger pays a fair price for a reliable seat rather than a cheap price for a waitlist. 

Reserved capacity — not merely marquee trains — must expand to meet demand, with dynamic pricing capturing the discretionary traveller instead of surrendering him to the airline. Speed must rise on the trunk routes where rail can still beat the bus. 

And the Railways must learn, as they never did with freight, to sell reliability and convenience — the confirmed berth, the predictable arrival, the seamless last mile — rather than to ration a shrinking supply.

For a hundred years the Railways were the Lifeline of the Nation because there was no other line. That age is over: the highway and the sky are now genuine lifelines too, and better ones on many journeys. The Railways can still be indispensable to how India moves — but only if they choose to compete for the passenger they once simply commanded. 

Standing still, as 741 crore against a pre-Covid 844 crore shows, is not holding ground. It is losing it, one confirmed berth at a time.

(The writer is a former civil servant. Views expressed are personal.)