THE VANDE BHARAT PARADOX
The Vande Bharat stable of trains is the pride of the Indian railways, and deservedly so. Their coaches are state of the art, comprising the best in the world in technology and comfort, rivalling the airlines at a fraction of the cost. Each set of 16 coaches costs about Rs. 130 crores, ten times the cost of an average train; the railways run 75 pairs of these trains currently, but plan to raise it to 4500 by 2047 . But the Vande Bharat has an Achilles heel-designed to run at 200 kms/hour, its average speed is only 76/hour, no better than the Rajdhani or the Shatabdi of much more ancient vintage, negating its very purpose and expenditure. Outdated track and signals technology have simply not kept pace with the more modern rolling stock, poor maintenance and anti-collision systems, overloaded train schedules bedevil the railway system. Proof of this lies in the statistics: in the eleven years ending 2023 there were 678 train crashes, resulting in 1061 deaths (ref National Crime Records Bureau). If one were to quantify all accidents such as people falling off trains or walking on the tracks or mishaps at railway crossings etc. the figure for just 2023 is a mind boggling 24678 accidents and 21835 deaths. This is the Vande Bharat Paradox- the attempt to impose a modern superstructure on a crumbling infrastructure without proper preparation or 360* planning, driven by misplaced priorities and a publicity-seeking paranoia. And this is not peculiar to the railways alone but pervades all our development parameters and sectors.
Take our highways. At 146,204 kms India has one of the largest networks of National Highways in the world, and this is expanding at 45 kms per day, having increased by 60% since 2015. Mr. Gadkari boasts that by 2030 we will rival the USA. In length maybe, but not in quality, for the Vande Bharat paradox is at play here too. The groundwork for such a rapid expansion has not been done: the roads are of poor quality, the cars and drivers not suited for high-speed expressways, and enforcement is wanting. The proof, again, lies in the statistics. There were 172000 deaths in accidents in 2024-25, with an astonishing AGR of 9.8%. We record 2247 deaths per million vehicles, as against 814 for China and 141 for the USA: our highways are corridors of death, not just transportation. The reason? Development of associated but essential hard and soft infrastructure has not kept pace with the physical construction of roads- we are grossly deficient in road designs and engineering, timely maintenance, enforcement of road discipline, international level road and traffic signages, efficient highway patrol systems, availability of medical and trauma centers to provide the golden hour treatment for accident victims, the licensing regimes are riddled with corruption. As in the case of the railways, we have put the cart before the horse here too.
Next, consider our education eco-system. Here again the statistics are impressive- a superstructure of 18000 colleges and 800 universities, churning out 15 million graduates every year, including 1.50 million engineers and 180000 doctors. Enough, one would think, to power us strongly to developed nation status. But look closely and one finds the Vande Bharat paradox playing out here too. For barely 40% of these youngsters are employable, such is the quality of our primary and higher education, thanks to poor regulation, corruption in the selection of teachers, persistent paper leaks, governments abdicating their responsibility and out-sourcing education to profiteering corporates. The proof is not far away here either: the global QS World University Rankings (2026) saw all but one of India's Top Ten educational institutes slide sharply in their ranks; IIT Bombay from 48 to 71, IIT Delhi from 44 to 59.
And worse is to come, for the BJP govt. at the center has an antediluvion concept of education, and is sparing no effort at hollowing out the very foundations of our education system. It is turning our Universities from being centers of inquiry to centers of strait-jacketed conformism, repression and ideological brain-washing. Vice Chancellors and Directors (of IIMs and IITs) are chosen on the basis of loyalty and ideological compatibility, not scholarship or administrative experience, and their primary task is to crush the spirit of inquiry; in JNU alone, more than 500 cases have been filed in the Delhi High Court by students and faculty against such high-handedness.
Even worse is the manner in which the UGC and NCERT are mutilating syllabi for colleges and schools and embedding in them an unscientific and backward-looking political ideology. So the Mughals are largely deleted from history books, secularism and federalism as subjects from text books, Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the Periodic Tables are expunged from Class 10 textbooks. This is an institutionalizing of scientific illiteracy. A generation of "qualified quacks" is being created by integrating modern, science based medicine with traditional systems and allowing homeopaths to practice modern pharmacology. In short, the very scientific temper which ensures real development is being eroded from under our educational institutions. The gleaming buildings are being hollowed out from within and the damage will be felt years down the line.
The Vande Bharat paradox pervades other areas of "development too, where all is not what it seems and contradictions are all too apparent: the fourth largest economy in the world but with 300 million in poverty and free rations for 800 million , glitzy metros that have the highest pollution levels in the world, the Umar Khalid paradox where a young scholar is neither tried nor convicted but continues to languish in jail for 5 years, the GDP paradox where, though the Govt. says we are growing at 7% or 8%, the IMF cautions that the figures are doctored, the Crime and Reward paradox where the crime is proved but the criminal is allowed to retain the proceeds of the crime. The list is endless We are living in an imaginary world where paradoxes reign supreme. To put it in the words of my late English teacher, Prof. P.Lal: We are what we think, having become what we thought. The institutionalization of delusion.
