Can Suresh Prabhu Make The Railways Environment Friendly?

The mammoth Indian Railways has agreed to meet some ambitious emission and sustainability targets set out at the climate change conference in Paris last year. Railway minister Suresh Prabhu will have to balance these commitments with profitability.

- Ashish Gupta

The great green hope for the Indian Railways some six years ago was the jatropha plant. The plan was to extract oil from the jatropha seeds to produce biofuel. The idea was to move to cleaner fuel while reducing dependence on fossil fuels. There was even talk of biofuels fixing the country’s oil bill. Six years on, those grand plans are conveniently never spoken of, and it’s almost as if the jatropha tree itself has been banished from the Promised Land. Persistent questioning shows that the research done before investing in jatropha was not sufficient; the amount of water and care the plant needed was more than what the Railways was prepared for.

The country’s green dreams seem to be a bit like the ill-fated jatropha experiment. They are well-meaning, sure, but more often than not, they are short-sighted and badly researched. Which is why every time a government official says something about reducing emissions, it is generally greeted with indifference, if not scepticism. So, when the Railways issued a statement that it would reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 32% by 2030, in line with the government’s promise at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris (called COP 21), there wasn’t much response from the public.

Yes, there was the inevitable sense of deja vu. Added to that was the fact that the Railways has consistently refused to disclose its emission levels despite repeated international demands. The International Union of Railways, the global body for railway co-operation, asks members (including India) to declare their greenhouse emissions. The Railways has claimed that it does not have proper data and so cannot declare this. The natural question sceptics ask is that if the Railways can’t put a number on its emissions, how can it reduce them?