“Not all those who wander are lost”—this line from a J R R Tolkien poem deserves an Indian derivative. Not all those who travel are tourists. We know of family travellers traversing cities, pilgrim packed into buses, and business jet-setters claiming extra legroom. But it’s time to look beyond and appreciate a hinterland revolution in motion, thanks to the Indian Railways.
There was a time when second-class train travel was a fancied—and often only—option among India’s urban middle-class citizens. Shyam Benegal captured the sentiment evocatively in Yatra, a 15-episode fiction series for Doordarshan in 1986, in an era when both TV viewers and train travellers had no choice beyond what the government offered.
Although India’s chequered history of luxury trains dates back to 1934, when the ‘ice-cooled’ Peshawar Express (later renamed Frontier Mail) was launched, the real journey began in 1969 with the fully air-conditioned Rajdhani Express that connected Howrah with New Delhi. Luxurious train travel gained momentum with the shorter Shatabdi Express routes launched in 1988.
More recently, we have seen the rise of the Vande Bharat Express, some of them with a ‘vistadome’ variant enabling panoramic views from the seat. The high-speed Mumbai-Ahmedabad Bullet Train is an emerging showpiece, while city metro systems are springing forth across the country. Air-conditioned chair cars have increased comfort, but lowered the romance of rugged travel in which co-passengers used to become friends, at least grudgingly during the journey.
These thoughts flooded in as I mulled over a reverse swing in India’s glorious railway system that has almost gone unnoticed, when I saw a government ad about the Prime Minister flagging off two Amrit Bharat Express trains before the Bihar elections.
These trains deserve attention partly for bringing back the romance of second-class travel, but with some frills added to suggest a hint of extra comfort. Their speed, design and choice of routes offer a mix of simplicity and luxury to migrant workers seeking fortunes in other parts of the country.
For these passengers from West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha, the states that beckon are Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Punjab, where employment opportunities are more abundant. The Amrit Bharat Express officially recognises this by connecting dots on the map that confirm paths of migration connecting high-growth zones with laggard ones. A humble-yet-superfast passport to prosperity.
These trains were commercially launched on New Year’s Day 2024. Typically intended to cover journeys of 800 km or more, the Amrit Bharat Express, as the name suggests, is heavenly nectar for seekers. A 4,000-km sleeper coach journey on it may cost as low as ₹1,500, enabling migrants to reach workplaces and travel back home for festivals at a fraction of a month’s salary. With promised speeds of 110-130 km per hour, the train can be a catalytic boon featuring LED lights, CCTVs, and access for the disabled.
It is socially symbolic of how this revolution has gone largely unnoticed that the Wikipedia page for the Amrit Bharat Express offers bare minimum of information compared to its Vande Bharat counterpart, which links the train’s story to railway history going back decades and lists its more than 75 routes.
Official data reveals a lot more about the Amrit Bharat Express’s revolutionary character. The government said a few weeks ago that 14 of the 100 approved Amrit Bharat trains are operational and as many as 17,000 non-AC coaches are planned to be inducted into the railways over the next five years, the lion’s share of which will go to seat Amrit Bharat passengers.
The total number of passengers travelling by general and unreserved coaches across India more than doubled from 275 crore in 2021-22, when the Covid pandemic was in its last throes, to 651 crore in 2024-25, a two-year surge partly powered up by the Amrit Bharat Express. Overall occupancy during the past two years has been near-full, indicating a strong supply-demand match.
The train’s destinations tell their own story. The first Amrit Bharat train was between East Delhi’s Anand Vihar terminal and Darbhanga in Bihar. Earlier this month, he flagged off one connecting Jogbani on Bihar-Nepal border with Erode near the bustling textile town of Tiruppur in Tamil Nadu, and Saharsa with Chheharta in Amritsar, close to Punjab’s wheatfields that routinely employ Bihari migrants.
Malda in West Bengal and Gomti Nagar in Uttar Pradesh are among the other destinations otherwise dominated by Bihar’s Gaya, Motihari and Sitamarhi. Mumbai, Bengaluru, Erode, Amritsar, and suburban Delhi stand at the other end, indicating the pattern of jobs-driven migration. Intermediate stations like Nagpur complete the picture. The routes remind me of migrant Siberian cranes seeking agreeable winter habitats in India.
In terms of rail networks, India ranks fourth in the world after the US, China, and Russia. But in passenger travel, India understandably and undeniably holds the top spot. The Amrit Bharat Express may not match the famous 9,289-km trans-Siberian train route, captured in Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s novel made into an Oscar-winning film by David Lean. But as an enabler of the world’s most populous nation’s demographic transition, Amrit Bharat is the kind of travel that would fascinate historians of the future.
Madhavan Narayanan | REVERSE SWING | Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)