Full Site Feed
Monsoon Train
There was a brilliant documentary tonight on BBC 4 about life on India’s railways during the monsoon season.
The scale of the railway in this continent is staggering :
- it’s the biggest civil employer in the world with 1.5 million employees
- one station, Kharagpur, has the longest railway platform in the world, at one kilometer in length
- 11 million people travel every day on the railways
- bureaucracy runs the railways with 12 thousand different forms being used to control every aspect of railway life
- Every day 1 million people travel through Howrah station
- The current Indian Railways Minister’s first act on coming into office was to ban plastic beakers for drinks, so re-employing hundreds of potters who supplied china mugs to the railway
