Pakistan is considered on the sixth number in most populated countries around the globe. Due to the high population, there’s an increase in the demand for traveling of people in Pakistan.
Pakistan railway system is giving more importance to maintenance as customers want to enjoy better services and better quality of products due to growing importance of quality in our life. To measure the quality of services of railways in Pakistan, the key determinants are customer satisfaction and retention.
Railways are considered the cheapest and most environmentally friendly mode of transportation. It helps to transport the bulk of goods from one place to another over long distances without any significant impact upon the environment. Rail is also one of the transportation modes which is emission efficient and there are electric trains that are powered by renewable energy.
In 1947, there were almost 8,122 km railway tracks. Pakistan railway track is a public sector that was known as Pakistan Western Railway back then. It is also considered the predominant mode of transportation in Pakistan. When it was at its peak in the year 1950- 1960, handled 73% of the freight traffic. It was approximately 4% less than 2011. But the Pakistan railway quality management has been critical over the past years due to the deteriorating quality of services, which ultimately cause a decreased number of passengers.
Due to poor quality management, Pakistan received a setback as a catalyst for economic development. The reason was also that the government didn’t invest properly in the infrastructure of the railway of Pakistan. There is a lack of human resource management and a lot of involvement in nepotism and political agendas. There is a huge involvement of personal interests by the government, which is a bad example of quality management in Pakistan.
It is required of quality management to be more responsible towards the quality of services and employees. But due to personal and political interest by the government, it creates indignation and a feeling of job security among employees. Therefore the Lack of management quality in Pakistan railways has destroyed the effectiveness of work in railways.
Poor quality management has severely affected long-term arrangement and their enforcement. They are doing persistent changes in the placement of senior servants. Their quality management remains an unsolved issue; their primary concerns are the current administration of PR states.
The physical infrastructure of railways is no longer productive and disrupts the productivity of work. The primary concern of the infrastructure of railways includes current administration, maintenance, and repair expenditures that are affecting operation costs. The reason behind the dispute within PR’s operations was locomotives with operational status.
Poor quality management is causing Travelling without ticket frequently. Quality management is not so responsible for checking the tickets and providing authentic tickets to passengers. There are a lot of unethical activities going on in Pakistan Railways. The railway’s unethical activity is occurring with all support of ticket verifiers and railway police. This is the failure of quality management. Quality management needs to increase monetary gain and to increase monetary gain, they need to improve the administration against all these leaks.
In the year 2015-16, there were almost 90,510 cases reported without ticket passengers. In the year 2016-17, there were almost 66,602 cases reported without ticket passengers. In the years 2017-18, there were almost 42,206 cases reported without ticket passengers. These figures show that the quality management department is somehow trying their best to improve the services and working on their ticket problems. This article sums up the current condition of the Pakistan Railway and also suggests some solutions to implement Quality in the department.
Implementations of quality management are poor and almost 70% of carriages are out of service. Passengers train, freight and cargo train are spare because of shortage of locomotives. But In 2014, management tried to improve the duty hours of the Badami bagh cargo train increased up to 6 days a week. It generated almost 37,0000 per day revenue.
The major earning of railways is from freight services but there’s a lack of freight trains in Pakistan. The tracks are over-aged and trains cannot maintain the average speed of 120 km/h speed in some sections like Karachi-Lahore. There is no proper time management due to passengers don’t feel satisfied. A lot of passengers complain about the low quality of services provided by Railway.
The quality management department claims that they maintain the quality but still there are certain gaps. Benchmarking can be used to fix the problems. Benchmarking is the process of learning, adapting from other organizations to improve the performance of the company. Pakistan can benchmark Japan and Indian Railway Models.
From this practice, railways can identify the perfect opportunities to improve the performance of trains and stations. They can learn from the experience of Japan and India. We can set ambitious and realistic targets. It is also going to help Pakistan Railway to allocate better resources and better prioritize targets.
Pakistan Railway can implement competitive benchmarking which is used to compare competitors. This is going to help the quality management of Railway to compare services and function of interests with specific competitors. For bench making, the management needs to decide what to benchmark, they need to understand the current performance of railways and plan accordingly.
They need to study others, learn from the given data and use the findings. Indian Railways have adequate locomotives and have 7500 engines with 38000 coaches. Their trains run about 14,300 daily and about 2.5 lakh of the wagon of the train. Their locomotives are manufactured domestically and manufactured at Chittaranjan. Their management focuses on Freight and hospitality. In 2013, 951 million tons of freight annually and they mainly focus on the quality of food and cleanliness in trains.
For the Elite Indians, India is providing World-class luxury to accumulate profit, such as The Golden Chariot. The Golden Chariot is specially designed for elite class Indian with luxurious facilities. Their trains run at their average speed of 140 km/h. India owns and also operates the railway hotels at Ranchi and Pori, in this way they commercialize property.
Indian quality management department takes seriously the concerns of the public, their availability of reservation, Internet booking and they also provide information of passengers over the Internet. To reduce the spoilage of track, Indian railways are planting trees. They have planted approximately 20 lakh trees every year. If we look at Japan Model, around 337 million tons’ freight was carried on Railway. Their railway companies are responsible for accountable to manage the commercial zones and stations like JR east. Their government is supportive and they are promoting the efficiency and improvement of railways in urban areas. They apply Kaizen methodology which focuses on improving several aspects of the business.
Due to this method, they value customers more and focus on the needs of customers, legal regulations, move of competitors, and material development. They believe that the past negligence of the government shouldn’t affect the current system. They focus on enhancing the duty hours of cargo trains. They use spare trains to become operational due to a shortage of locomotives. Their railway management also focuses on commercializing the trash property to generate more revenue. They manage proper time that automatically adds value to the customer’s perception. They have introduced E-ticketing to avoid without ticket passengers and all information is available on the website online. This makes an easy reservation for trains.
Government can also privatize this department for the sake of implementing quality for the customer. The people of Pakistan should be able to fully enjoy the benefit of the platform and it can be clearly seen by many real-life examples that the private sector is more than capable of implementing quality in the departments.
In today’s world, railways play a significant role in the economic development of the country. In the above sections, we have analyzed that the Railways of Pakistan are facing problems for many years. The Pakistan Railway has faced a lot of losses due to lack of management. The poor infrastructure of Railways and their poor service standards has ruined the railroad of Pakistan.
To improve the performance, higher authorities need to give more importance and focus to this specific area by encouraging the public-private partnership. To increase the total revenue, the Railways of Pakistan need to engage with officials in more commercial deals with different industries. They can get help from publicity to attract more public.
The writer is a student of Forman Christian College.