Trains, not planes, please

If any district headquarters in Karnataka doesn’t already have an airport, we can be sure it is hoping to get one soon: the town will seem incomplete and insignificant otherwise. But it isn’t really their fault that their imaginations are running this way. The ways in which airports are talked about by politicians, businessmen and media personnel in India, that is, as fancy objects which enable fast connections between towns and automatically improve local business and hike up local land value and mean good things all around, without any sense for their ecological harm, are playing a big part here.

A train from the Paris airport can help reach a town in the southern-most tip of France -- a distance of 1,100 kilometres -- in about 3 hours. Such a train from the Bengaluru airport would help reach, let’s say, Bidar, the city in the northern most part of Karnataka, in around 2 hours. In other words, passengers from Bidar would reach the Bengaluru airport in the same amount of time that it takes people from Electronic City to reach there at present. And high-speed trains from the airports in Hyderabad, Hubli, Pune, Belgaum and Mumbai would take between 20 and 90 minutes to reach Bidar. They would have made it unnecessary to build an airport in Bidar.

Policy discussions in Europe have been deliberating the need to reduce and eventually phase out air travel within the European Union. The flight-shame movement that started in Sweden a few years ago, which asked people to change their flying habits in view of the highly polluting flight emissions, and the general alarm about climate change appears to have mattered. According to a recent survey, more than 60% of Europeans support a ban on short-haul flights. France and Austria have already brought in legislations to do away with short-haul flights in favour of high-speed trains.

Although the emissions in short-haul flights is little compared with that seen in long-haul flights, the move seen in France and Austria deserves to be applauded. For their air travel substitution methods to really work, though, rail travel needs to become less expensive than it is at present. While the aviation industry will resist regulatory measures, securing the health of the planet should take policy priority over business profits.

As the European Union takes small steps to rid itself of a destructive aviation culture, countries like India, where air travel will prove ecologically catastrophic if embraced by large numbers of its people, ought to show more discernment and wisdom. Emulating other countries isn’t always wrong or bad.

Making space for high-speed trains in India will, of course, mean large expenses not just for building trains but for improving the existing rail tracks and rail safety standards. But the virtues and urgency of clean transport are so clear to see that our politicians and planners had better explore without delay the means of bringing about this transition everywhere. Their obsession with building road highways and airports, both of which stoke high fuel consumption, needs to go. If they refuse to think in ecologically sane ways, we must make it difficult for them to do so.

David McLelland, an influential American theorist in the 1960s, had produced a neat table that classified countries based on their air passenger data. The countries where this data was high were developed and those with a small figure to show were undeveloped. Turning the table on this ecocidal idea, India and the other countries should instead prove that low air traffic is a sign of being developed.