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| Sunday, 5 October 2003 |
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Editor, Sunday Observer. E-mail: [email protected] Snail mail : Sunday Observer, 35, D.R.Wijewardana Mawatha, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Telephone : 94 1 429239 / 331181 Fax : 94 1 429230 Trains At one time in our colonial and post-colonial history, the 'Night Mail' was the children's fun-ride and, the long, winding rail-road through the glorious hill country was part of Sri Lanka's travel folklore. Today, the berths are a cockroach-infested nightmare, while drunken, unkempt, coach attendants hover remorselessly for that 'santhosam' just to issue a clean set of linen. In the entire train the toilets are not cleaned even once during the whole journey resulting in the stench from toilets filling the whole coach by mid-journey. This is in stark contrast with the Indian Railways, for example, where at fixed stations during the journey, cleaners enter the coaches and clean both toilets and the rest of compartment as well. Indian express trains, those now famous 'Shatabdis', (usually) start and arrive exactly on time, and the trains halt at a station with every coach stopped precisely at that coach number indicated on the platform. What has happened to that 'CGR' turned 'SLR' about which, at one time, books were written and, even today, sell as expensive coffee table volumes? The way things seem to be going today, 'trains' in Sri Lanka may end up only as a hobby of models with the real thing relegated to a museum, perhaps. What has happened is perhaps evocative of larger processes of societal and administrative deterioration in our post-colonial era. Bereft of the authoritarian discipline of the colonial regime and also, deprived by colonial destruction, of the social order and discipline of the pre-colonial civilisation, we Sri Lankans, have failed to re-build society, economy or polity in a proper, working order. Not that our former colonial masters gave us much of a chance in their continued neo-colonial impositions in the name of 'aid' and 'development'. But with freedom, it has been up to us to assert our independent creativity. Whether we have or have not may be judged by what is happening to our Railways today. Today, trapped as we are in the post-colonial global economic order, we are compelled to comply with a globally imposed discipline of privatisation and an open-market trade policy. Being a small country with a weak economy we, no doubt, cannot assert the same degree of independence that great powers like India do. But what has happened to our native genius? There have been moments in the past when neo-colonial policy impositions have been creatively resisted or, at least, creatively adapted to suit our specific socio-cultural and economic and political needs. The way President R. Premadasa resisted World Bank/IMF demands for an end to welfarism and creatively evolved the Janasaviya (now Samurdhi) is a supreme example. Today, social 'safety nets' are acknowledged even by our foreign ideological masters. It is this creativity that is sorely needed in the on-going privatisation policy. Privatisation of the railways may be the best way forward - not for merely saving on State expenditure, but for the provision of an efficient, if more expensive, public rail transport system. The public bus transport system has yet to reach that level of orderliness, if threadbare, maintained during the time of the Ceylon Transport Board. There are far more buses, but on less routes and most services are restricted to profitable time slots only. This certainly does not provide for efficient transport as required in a modern capitalist economy. Trains have long been known to be even more efficient as a system of mass transit. The current privatisation of the Railways, then, must meet that challenge if the legends of our beloved trains are to remain alive. |
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