Feeding the masses

My Scholarship entry - Somewhere on the Indian Railways

INDIA | Sunday, 23 November 2014 | Views [1054] | View Larger Image

Inside ‘Sleeper Class’, around midnight, somewhere between Rishikesh and Varanasi. The fans were roaring, the car was shaking and you could hear the wheels squealing through the open windows. With two or three people to a bed, the overcrowded car remained loud and busy much of the night.

Approaching Kolkata the train traffic was backed up for miles, so we rolled into the sprawling metropolis slowly, alongside other trains. Here a man was leaning out the open berth door, waiting to jump off.

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On Indian trains, the window is often seen as a trash bin, and the open-chute train toilets drop sewage directly onto the speeding tracks below. The result is thousands of miles of sewage-covered rails, with fields of paper and plastic on either side of the track.

Here, at a station near Mysore, women with straw hand-brooms sweep the littered rails.

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Feeding the masses

My Scholarship entry - Somewhere on the Indian Railways

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