Chapter IX: Indian Railways (2)

The working expenses of the railways exhibit very great differences both as respects actual amounts and their per centage proportions to traffic. Thus, for instance, on the Great Southern of India Line they were for the year 1865 2s. 7½d. a mile, and only 2s. 3d. a mile in 1866; yet the fuel cost was £2. 18s. a ton; exactly the same price as on the Bombay and Baroda line, the working expenses of which were 8s. 1¾d. in 1865 per train mile. In 1866 they had fallen to 6s. 8d.; so that the _difference_ between these two amounts is exactly two-thirds of the _total_ working cost per train mile of the Great Southern Company. The East Indian was 3s. 8d. per train mile in both 1865 and 1866. But the Madras cost was only 2s. 10¾d. per train mile in 1865. It went up, however, 3¼d. in 1866, being 3s. 2d. Yet the average price it pays for coal is the same as that paid by the Great Indian Peninsular, the cost per train mile of which in 1865 was 6s. 2d., in 1866, 6s. 4½d. No doubt the two Ghaut inclines add heavily both to locomotive and to permanent way charges, but they do not explain why the working cost per train mile should be double that on the Madras Line. It is a remarkable fact also, and it is one which should be recorded to the honour of the Madras management, that, although its traffic receipts per mile are almost the lowest on the whole system of East Indian railways—£13 a mile a week—its per centage of working expenses is actually the lowest, 43½.[104] The per centage of the East Indian, with a weekly mileage receipt of £43, is 44½. The Great Indian Peninsular, the weekly receipt per mile of which is £48, is 59¾; and on the Bombay and Baroda the weekly receipt per mile is £29, the working expenses being 64½ per cent. The Scinde working expenses were 85½ per cent. of the receipts; but the unlucky Calcutta and South-Eastern spends £109. 10s. for every £100 it earns.

Accidents have hitherto been rather numerous on Indian railways. The returns for 1866 were not complete at the time of Mr. Juland Danvers’ last report. In 1864 there were 345 accidents on an average of 2,699 miles of railway open, and the number had fallen to 284 on an average of 3,153 miles open in 1865. The Madras line, on the whole, has had fewer accidents than any other company—only five in 1865. Accidents by fire are rather numerous, especially in those districts where wood is used as fuel. This is, perhaps, also to be expected, in consequence of the conveyance of cotton forming so important a portion of the business of the two companies having their termini at Bombay. Accidents from fire, however, sensibly diminished in 1865, which is ascribed to the extended introduction of covered waggons for carrying cotton, to the greatly increased use of coke, which gives out less sparks, and to the custom that prevails now of invariably placing several waggons (even running empties for the purpose, if none others are available) between the engine and cotton waggons.

But although the number of accidents was less in 1865 than in 1864, they were more destructive in their character in the former year, 316 persons having been killed or injured in 1865, as against 256 in 1864. But in these numbers are included the persons injured through their own fault or imprudence. It deserves to be recorded that in eleven years the Madras Railway has carried nearly twelve millions of passengers, hitherto without a case of injury to any of them. But, on the other hand, owing to two serious collisions on the line, a large number of the company’s servants have been fatally or seriously injured. Native passengers are reckless; but native servants are especially so, for out of 49,398 employed on all lines in 1865, 96 were killed and 97 injured, or 193 in all, against 147 in 1864, with about the same number of servants. Of these casualties, 136, or 1 in 363, occurred in 1865 through incaution or misconduct; 42 were killed or injured in attempting to get upon or off, or falling from, engines or carriages in motion; and 52 were run over or struck whilst incautiously crossing, standing, or walking upon the line.

Reference to page 176 will enable the reader to compare the number and character of Indian railway accidents with those on the railways of the United Kingdom.

There is one more subject connected with the working expenses of railways in India to which reference must be made—the staff. It is quite evident that on railways, as in every other department of Anglo-Indian service, whether it be governmental or corporate, all the persons in leading positions—not only those to direct and command, but those in the scale some degrees subordinate to them—must be European British subjects; not merely of European descent, but of actual birth as such. Without them the great railway system of India can never be efficiently worked. The returns of persons employed on the lines in 1866 show this fact very clearly, for whilst “native” servants were (excluding the Southern of India, which has not sent in any return of its staff) 30,838, the Europeans and East Indians were only 2,736. All the highest appointments were filled by Europeans. East Indians could rise to the class of station-masters; so could the natives, in an inferior degree, but these last constituted the whole of the humblest classes of servants. On the East Indian Railway the comparative estimation of the three nativities for the appointments of station-masters was thus shown:—Out of 114, 35 are Europeans, who receive salaries the lowest of which (irrespective of ample lodging accommodation) is £180, and they range up to £420 a year. Five East Indians, very choice and exceptionally superior men, have from £180 to £300 a year; whilst the salaries of the 74 natives vary from a minimum of £25 to a maximum of £250 a year.

It will always he necessary to recruit the upper ranks of railway officials in India from amongst the railway officials of Great Britain; and up to now, as far as our knowledge and acquaintance extend, no gentleman has left this country to fill a railway appointment in India at much less increase than three times his English emoluments. It is possible that efficient gentlemen may henceforth be obtained at smaller comparative salaries; but we doubt that such will be the fact. The character of the climate of India, so telling, as a rule, upon Europeans, but especially upon those who do not go to it when very young, and who are liable to exposure out of doors in the broiling hours of the day, and during the down-pours of the deluging rain torrents every year, and the necessary separation of a man and his wife from their children during the period of their education, must naturally deter officials from leaving comfortable appointments in England, except under the influence of strong pecuniary temptations. The risk of health-failure is also accompanied by knowledge of the fact that men cannot insure their lives, except upon payment of very high annual premiums.

The manner in which the East Indian Railway Company proposes to meet this last difficulty is by the establishment of a Provident Fund, the principles of which are explained by the following extract from the last Report of the Directors:—

“One of the most difficult questions which has presented itself to the board in the organisation and management of their staff in India has been how to meet the claims that have been constantly urged for the payment of pensions, after a given period of service, founded upon the analogy of the Indian services. The company’s permanent European staff consists of gentlemen drawn chiefly from the best-managed English lines. It is felt that without some provision being made for them in case of sickness, involving their retirement from the service, or in cases where, after a certain period of time, they may wish to retire, or when it may be considered desirable that they should do so, the railway service in India does not present sufficient attractions. Various schemes, with a view to make the service more popular, have been suggested, both here and in India; but, until recently, every proposition which has been made has been found, from one cause or other, to be impracticable. After much anxious consideration—and being satisfied of the almost insuperable difficulty of applying the principle of pensions to a constantly-varying service such as this must necessarily be—it has been thought that the best mode of meeting the difficulty is to establish a Provident Fund, in the advantages of which all the servants of the company, European and native, receiving a monthly pay of Rs. 30 and upwards shall participate, the Fund being supported by contributions from the staff, assisted by the company. It is proposed—1st. That the present staff shall contribute to the fund only if they think fit; but that all persons joining the service on or from a given date, with a monthly pay of Rs. 30, and those who may be promoted to this pay shall be required to do so. 2nd. That the staff shall be divided into two classes,—class A consisting of all European servants of the company, and class B comprising all servants of the company not Europeans. 3rd. That those in class A shall contribute 5 per cent., and those in class B 2½ per cent. on their respective monthly salaries or wages. 4th. That the company shall contribute annually 1 per cent. on the surplus net earnings, after 6 per cent. per annum has been appropriated to the company and the Government, in the terms of their contract, together with 1 per cent. on the 6 per cent. so appropriated, so far as the surplus will admit of the said contributions. 5th. That the moneys of the fund shall be invested, from time to time, either in Indian Government Securities or in the Railway Stock, and that, subject to rules and regulations to be prescribed by the board, the fund and all accruing interest shall be the property of the respective members of the staff in the ratio of their subscriptions.

“It is estimated that when the line earns over 6 per cent., the contributions of the company and the staff will be about equal; as the profits increase, the company’s contribution will most probably be the larger of the two. The board are of opinion that the creation of such a fund will be most acceptable and beneficial to the staff in numerous ways; and so far as the company is concerned, the effect of it being to give every servant, who can influence its success, a direct personal interest in the economical working of the line, it can scarcely fail to be advantageous.”

Although the Secretary of State for India has sanctioned the arrangement, and the shareholders of the company, at their meeting held on the 2nd of July last, approved of, and agreed to its adoption, we doubt whether it is one that is likely to prove satisfactory to the officials, especially to those from Europe. The practical operation of the scheme is this. Henceforth, the Europeans are, from the moment of their appointments, to he subjected to a deduction of 5 per cent. from the nominal amount of their salaries, but the company is not to contribute to the fund until after the net earnings have amounted to 6 per cent. and upwards; thus, if these earnings were declared at the rate of £5. 19s. 11d. per annum, the shareholders would receive, firstly, 5 per cent., and secondly, the half of 19s. 11d., under the contract between the Government and the company; the Government would receive the second half of the 19s. 11d., and the Provident Fund _nil_. This scheme should be altered. The deduction of 5 per cent. from salaries is too high, and the contributions of the shareholders and of the Government should commence at a much earlier step in the scale of net earnings.

The rolling stock provided for Indian railways is miserably insufficient. The number of locomotives possessed by all the companies on the 1st of January, 1867, was only 795, not quite one engine for every five miles. The other descriptions of plant are equally defective in point of numbers. The East Indian Company announced, in its report of January last, that it intended to make up its rolling stock for a traffic of £60 a mile, at a cost of about £300,000. The other companies will have to outlay at least half-a-million on rolling stock almost immediately.

Apart from every consideration purely political, the railways of India have been the means of rendering the greatest service to England, at a moment of greatest peril. Through them she has received supplies of cotton that otherwise could never have got even as far as a port of shipment. There are seven districts from which these supplies come. By far the largest and most important is the Oomrawattee Cotton District, which both the main line of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, and its Nagpoor Extension pass through. When the extension line of this company to Jubbulpore is completed, it will, jointly with the East Indian Railway, open up the Sassegur District, and, on the opening of the Madras Connection, it will touch upon a fourth. The Bombay and Baroda goes into the midst of the great Guzzerat Cotton Fields; the Madras Line through that of Combatore. There is a comparatively small one at nearly the extreme south of the continent; and the smallest of all is in the Punjaub, between, and to the northward both of Delhi and Lahore. Of the production of these cotton districts, we shall speak presently.

If England have found almost exclusively the capital for the construction of Indian railways, she has not only made a safe—or, it might rather be said, a first class—investment, but she has also benefited largely in her manufactures and commerce through their construction. The amount of capital expended in the United Kingdom in consequence of Indian railways between 1851 and 1866 has been as follows:—In 1851 it was £154,212; in 1852 it was £174,920; in 1853, £252,484; 1854, £960,878; 1855, £1,939,101; 1856, £1,752,813; 1857, £1,324,873; 1858, £1,940,052; 1859, £2,507,949; 1860, £2,396,924; 1861, £1,596,010; 1862, £1,854,289; 1863, £1,411,661; 1864, £1,387,699; 1865, £2,192,090; 1866, £3,942,598. It is expected that the amount expended in England during 1867 will be about £2,457,250. The industry of the mother country has thus been greatly assisted by the valuable orders represented by these figures. If all these amounts be added together, it will be found that they are nearly £26,500,000, or between a third and a half of the £67,932,550 that have been expended up to April last on account of Indian railways. The tons weight of goods despatched have been 3,195,862; and as the number of ships they were conveyed in was 4,827, it followed that the average load which each carried was 662 tons.

We have dwelt upon Indian railways at greater length than we had originally intended, but the subject is a great one; for it must not be forgotten that the capital expended upon them at this date is a seventh of that to the same account in the United Kingdom. Presently it will be a sixth, and hereafter it will he a fifth; because also the mileage of these railways is, even now, nearly a third of the railways of Great Britain; presently it will he more than a third. On the 1st of January, 1867, it was nearly half that of France; only 1,413 miles less than that of Prussia, 1,138 less than that of Bavaria, 69 more than that of the Austrian dominions, 1,030 more than that of Italy, 854 more than that of Spain, 2,160 more than that of Belgium; 2,177 more than that of both Russia in Europe and Russia in Asia; and 1,574 more than that of Canada.[105] On the 3,638 miles which, towards the close of 1866, constituted the length of Indian railways, the train miles run amounted to 10,120,920. The gross receipts earned by those trains were £4,537,235, just 1,425,000 more than in 1865; of these gross earnings, £1,278,580 were received from passenger traffic, and £3,091,723 from that of merchandise. The number of passengers carried in 1866 was 12,867,000, being 367,000 more than in 1865. This, of course, in no way represents the proportion due to population in British India, for in 1861 that population was 143,271,210, dwelling on 956,436 square miles of land.

Let us proceed some few steps farther with reference to the development of India. Its revenue has increased from £27,832,237 in 1852, to £45,652,897 in 1865. But on the the other hand, the expenditure, which was £27,098,462, or £750,000 within its income, in 1852, was £46,450,920, or £800,000 in excess of income in 1865. Then, us a further but doubtful proof of prosperity, the public debt of India had risen from £55,114,693 in 1852, to 98,518,145 in 1865.[106] The tonnage of vessels entered and cleared in India during 1852 was (exclusive of coasting trade) 1,591,937; in 1865 it was 4,268,666. The value of imports (including bullion and specie) into India in 1840 was £8,415,940; in 1852 they were of the value of £17,292,549; and in 1865 they had increased to £49,514,275. The value of its exports rose in fifteen years from £20,798,342 to £69,471,791.[107] In 1852 the total amount of cotton which British India sent to the United Kingdom was only 84,922,432 lbs., just a ninth of that received from the United States, which was 765,630,544 lbs. In 1866 the amount of cotton imported from India was 615,302,240 lbs.,[108] exactly 95,244,840 lbs. more than from the United States, and not far from one half of the total amount imported from all places, namely, 1,377,129,936 lbs. Thanks to India, the total quantity of cotton imported in 1866 is only 13,000,000 lbs. less than it was in 1860, the year of our greatest cotton importation. In that year the quantity received from India was little more than a seventh of the importations from all sources. It is, therefore, not to be wondered that Manchester has altered its cotton machinery, and has rendered it suited for working the cotton, the importation of which will, thanks to Indian railways, soon make England, as regards supplies, independent of all other countries in the world.[109]

Let us say, finally, that if we have dwelt at such length upon the yet _infant_ railway system of the Indian Empire, it is because India is a land that has a well-recorded history dating back nearly 4,000 years, with national monuments and buildings still existing, and in comparatively sound preservation, that were erected 400 years before Rome was created; and, last of all, BECAUSE of the now standing army of India, numbering 190,195 men, 71,880 first saw the light from Heaven in the United Kingdom. It is at that number our reinforcements will have to be never-failingly kept up, if we wish to avoid the dangers and horrors of a second Indian mutiny.

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_Postscript._—Immediately after page 271 was printed, we met a gentleman who, in consequence of his professional connection with Persia, has, for several years, made the subject of a communication from the north-western side of Asia Minor, through Persia and Affghanistan to India, his constant study. He takes a different view from us as to the starting point of the LONG RAILWAY, but in many other respects our opinions are identical. It is probable that they may be brought jointly before the public in a more detailed and substantive form, in the course of a few months. We may here mention that, as early as 1847, Mr. Austin H. Layard, M.P., was alive to the importance of this communication, for in his work on the “Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon” (London, Murray, 1853), he says, that the route of the Euphrates, the adoption of which he urgently recommends “must be the second Indian route until civilisation and Christianity afford a reasonable basis for those gigantic schemes which would carry a line of iron through countries almost unknown, and scarcely yet visited by a solitary European traveller.”