Ruminations on a Railway Trip

There is a place called Burdwan about 100 km from Kolkata which is the district HQ of the district of the same name. This district is like the rice bowl of West Bengal. I went there on some official work and had these thoughts on the way back on a local train. 

I was reading the Economic Times and noticed that there were three articles which had something or the other to do with LG. One article was an interview with someone from the company's senior management etc. There was this phenomenon of paid news that was well, in the news a little while back. When I saw this I began to wonder if companies actually pay newspapers to group articles about them together so as to improve recall in a reader's mind.

One of the best places to marvel at India's population is a railway station. Just stand inside the Howrah station when a local train comes in and try to walk against the flow. Those who have stayed in Mumbai must have experienced this to a much larger degree.

Railway officials stand at station exits to check whether people have bought tickets or not. This is fine as far as large stations are concerned, but what about the smaller ones? There are two kinds of people broadly that come to a railway station, passengers and those who accompany the passengers. While the former are expected to have train tickets the latter are expected to purchase platform tickets. The ticket counters are separate from the entrance possibly to reduce crowding at the entrances. But there can be many people, especially on local trains who do not purchase any kind of tickets. If the railways can allow entry only after a ticket is bought I am sure the revenue will go up compared to what it is. At the same time this should  not lead to stampedes, so appropriate measures will have to be taken in that direction also.

Hawkers are not allowed onto trains as far as I understand, they still get on and I have nothing against that per se. An interesting innovation I saw was a hook from which packets were suspended. In local trains there are these hand supports that hang from above. The vendor had his stuff hanging from a metal construction which had a hook at the top. He could thus suspend it from the hand support. I found this pretty neat. There was a vendor who was selling rice papads which are like chips. I asked him for a packet and was surprised when he said it was for two rupees. I believe these chips and other eatables (like Kurkure) are made from broken rice which is very cheaply available. Granted a company like Lay's has other expenditure like distribution costs, endorsement costs etc, but I was left wondering what the profit margins on such products are like.