Vande Bharat and Beyond

The introduction of the country’s first Vande Bharat sleeper train between Guwahati and Kolkata on Saturday marked a major development as far as railway communication between the Northeastern region and the rest of the country. The history of railway communication in the Northeast dates back to 1881 when the first train moved from Dibrugarh to Margherita in upper Assam under the initiative of Dr. John Berry White, a renowned civil surgeon who had set up a company called Assam Railway & Trading Company, primarily to extract coal for the tea industry. It is also interesting to note that in 1904, the Assam Bengal Railway Company established the Lumding-Badarpur Hill Section and connected it to Dibrugarh in order to evacuate coal from upper Assam to Chittagong port for export. Around the same time, Guwahati got connected to Kolkata through Dhubri. But, when the rest of India was rejoicing on the attainment of independence in 1947, Assam’s railway link to the rest of the country was severed because of the creation of East Pakistan, comprising erstwhile Eastern Bengal. It took about five years for the railway link between the Northeast and the rest of India to be restored through the Siliguri Corridor. At present, while the introduction of the Vande Bharat sleeper train between Guwahati and Kolkata must be hailed, the attention of the government in general and the Indian Railways in particular must be drawn to the fact that passengers traveling by trains from the region to New Delhi and other destinations in northern India face regular harassment as they travel through Bihar. Social media platforms are rife with complaints that while people in Bihar consider express trains plying between the national capital and the Northeast as local passenger trains, railway officials and security staff often turn a blind eye to such situations. There have been allegations that objections by passengers travelling after paying for luxury travel only lead to trouble. It is time the elected representatives from the region raised this issue in Parliament and exerted pressure on the Railway Ministry so that railway travel remains a peaceful and comfortable experience.