The Hyderabad MMTS may be already notorious for its laissez-faire attitude, but the suburban rail services seem to be trying hard to best their own record of tardiness lately — trains are now plying up to an hour behind schedule now! A sizeable percentage of the Hyderabadi populace depend on MMTS and now with techies robbed off shuttle services, the demand has only increased. What really irks commuters though is that with no announcements to inform them about the estimated delay, it’s almost like they are expected to develop some kind of Extra Sensory Perception to deal with the situation.
Techies’ work schedules are dotted with glitches, thanks to the unreliable MMTS. Nisheeth Sinha, who commutes 30 km from Sitaphalmandi to Hitec City by the MMTS every day says, “If it happens for a day or two, it is acceptable. But day after day, trains are delayed by more than forty minutes or even an hour. And this happens during peak hours! Nobody seems to be bothered about the timings despite the fact that it completely ruins our schedules.”
With no other mode of transport, professionals are forced to resign their everyday routines to the mercy of the MMTS. Pawan Devarasetty, a city techie, says, “I usually board the MMTS at Malakpet. But every day, the train reaches only 40 minutes past the scheduled arrival time. Added to this, there are no announcements informing us about how late the train was running. One can’t even decide to go by another mode of transport as everyone’s left clueless. The announcement is made only seconds before the train arrives.”
“I end up working late since I reach office late. I’ve now decided not to use the services anymore,” adds Pavan.
Lack of separate MMTS tracks plays the biggest spoilsport and commuters speculate that suburban trains are stalled because long-distance express trains are given preference. Sandeep Gabbula, a financial analyst working in Mahindra Satyam, says, “There are no separate tracks built by MMTS and they ply on the same ones built for long distance trains. Hence, MMTS trains are made to wait for almost 45 minutes.”
The Railway authorities however, choose to play down people’s issues and spew out generic statistics instead. Chandrima Roy, Chief PRO, South Central Railways, says, “In August 2009, only six per cent of MMTS trains were more than 20 minutes late and 89 per cent were less than 15 minutes late”
Authorities also admit that the recent spate of rains are to be blamed for the delays. “There have been signal failures at Sanathnagar and Hafeezpet due to the heavy rains in the last few days,” she says.
Talking about their inability to inform about the delays in advance, Chandrima says, “Most stations like Borabanda, Hitec City etc. are only halt stations, they don’t have the infrastructure to predict the position of the trains. Only stations that have the necessary equipment can do so. In another 4 months, we will have GPRS-embedded MMTS trains that will point out the exact position of the trains so that announcements are made with precision.”
Until then, MMTS commuters are better off honing their ESP.