Chapter 17: Transport and Communication
For more than a hundred years after the first train ran in India, the railway map of the western coast carried a strange gap. Trains reached Mumbai from the north and Mangaluru from the south, but between the two lay a stretch of about 760 kilometres with no line at all.
The reason lay in the land. Along the Konkan coast the Western Ghats rise steeply only a few kilometres inland, leaving a narrow and broken strip of lowland between the hills and the sea. Dozens of short, fast rivers pour down the slope and cut straight across that strip on their way to the Arabian Sea. To lay a track here, engineers would have to bridge every river and bore through every ridge in the way.
The Konkan Railway, opened in 1998, finally did it. Its 760 kilometres cross nearly 2,000 bridges and pass through 91 tunnels; the longest tunnel runs for almost 6.5 kilometres through solid rock. The line links Roha in Maharashtra to Mangaluru in Karnataka, threading through Goa on the way.
The story holds the idea this whole chapter turns on. A transport route is never drawn on a blank sheet. The land decides where movement is easy and where it is costly; rivers, mountains and coasts push a line one way and pull it another. And once the route is finally built, it begins to change the very places it touches.
Diagram
Fig. 17.0-1 Caption: The Konkan coast leaves little level ground: the Western Ghats rise steeply just inland, and short rivers cut the narrow strip on their way to the sea. Brief: A cross-section (profile) drawn from west (left) to east (right). From left: the Arabian Sea, then a narrow coastal lowland only a few kilometres wide, then the steep escarpment of the Western Ghats rising to the plateau surface on the right. Show one short river crossing the coastal strip and entering the sea. Mark the railway alignment running north–south along the strip (shown here in section), with a bridge carrying it over the river and a tunnel taking it through a rocky spur of the Ghats. Emphasise how little flat land there is between hills and sea. Label: Arabian Sea, coastal plain, Western Ghats, river, railway bridge, tunnel. The profile runs from the sea (west) up to the plateau (east).
17.1 Transport as an Infrastructural Resource
Infrastructure is the set of basic facilities — roads, railways, power lines, ports, communication networks — on which every other economic activity rests. A factory cannot run, a crop cannot reach a buyer and a hospital cannot be supplied unless the means to move goods, people and messages already exist. Transport and communication are the two arms of this supporting structure, and they are the subject of this chapter.
Transport is the organised movement of passengers and goods from one place to another. It is the link between production and consumption: the wheat grown in one region and the person who eats it in another are joined by a chain of trucks, wagons and ships. Where that chain is cheap and dependable, both ends of it prosper.
For this reason transport routes are often called the economic arteries of a country. Like arteries they carry the flow that keeps distant parts alive, and when they are blocked or missing, whole regions are cut off from the national economy.
Each Mode Does A Different Job
No single means of transport suits every task. Heavy, bulky, low-value goods — coal, ore, foodgrain — move most cheaply by rail, water or pipeline. Light, urgent or perishable items — vegetables, mail, medicines — move better by road or by air. Short, door-to-door trips belong to the road; long ocean hauls belong to the ship.
Much of this chapter is the story of matching each mode to the land it must cross and the demand it must serve. The means of transport fall into three families — land, water and air — each with its own members.
Flowchart
Fig. 17.1-1 Caption: The three families of transport and the members of each. Nodes: Means of transport → three families. Land → railways / roadways / pipelines. Water → inland waterways / coastal and oceanic routes. Air → domestic (national) services / international services.
Why A Network Matters For India
India is a very large country, running roughly 3,200 km from Kashmir in the north to Kanniyakumari in the south and a similar distance from Kutch in the west to the north-eastern hills. Across that space it holds enormous variety of land, climate, language and economy. A well-knit transport system is what binds these distances into a single working economy.
Such a network brings people of different regions closer to one another. It lets a surplus in one area feed a shortage in another, and it reduces the economic isolation of remote districts that would otherwise stay outside the market.
The value is not only economic. A dependable network strengthens national integration and defence preparedness, moving troops and relief as readily as it moves trade. It also lessens the centrifugal forces — the pulls towards separateness — that distance and difference can build up in a large and varied country.
Transport therefore does two things at once. Its own pattern is shaped by the land and the economy it serves — which is why the map of any network repays close reading. And in turn it reshapes that economy, drawing new places into reach and shifting where activity gathers. The sections that follow take up each mode in this double light.
17.2 Rail Transport
Railways are the main artery of India’s inland transport. They move the country’s heavy, long-distance traffic — coal to power stations, ore to steel plants, grain across states and millions of passengers between distant cities. No other land mode carries so much, so cheaply, over such distances.
17.2.1 The Growth and Reach of Indian Railways
The first train in India ran in 1853, over the 34 kilometres between Mumbai and Thane. From that short line the system has grown into one of the largest railway networks in the world, and the largest in Asia after China’s, with a route length of roughly 68,000 kilometres.
The network today carries tens of millions of passengers every day and a very large share of the country’s bulk freight. It earns from two streams. A fare is the charge the railway makes for carrying a passenger; freight is the charge it makes for carrying goods and luggage.
The system has changed in kind, not only in size. At Independence only a few hundred kilometres of track were electrified; today most of the broad-gauge network runs on electric traction. Cleaner, cheaper electric and diesel engines have replaced the older steam locomotives, which were costlier to run and heavily polluting.
17.2.2 Factors Governing the Railway Network
A railway needs a nearly level, gently graded track, and building one is expensive. Where it runs, and how densely, is therefore decided by the land, by the economy and by history. Three sets of factors shape the Indian network.
Geographical Factors
Level plains are ideal. The Northern Plain, with its flat land, deep alluvial soil and dense population, offered the easiest ground and the strongest demand, and it carries the densest network. Even here, though, the many rivers force costly bridges, and the flood plains of parts of Bihar and Assam remain thinly served.
Rugged and difficult land resists the railway. The uneven surface of the southern plateau is less suitable than the plain. The Himalayan ranges are so steep that they are almost without railways; the few that exist are narrow-gauge hill routes such as Kalka–Shimla and Siliguri–Darjeeling. Deserts, dense forests and marshy tracts are all unfavourable — there was, for example, no line between Jodhpur and Jaisalmer in the Thar Desert until 1966.
Where a barrier can be crossed only at certain points, the railway is forced through those points. The Western Ghats, which wall off the western coast, are pierced by rail only at a few gaps.
Economic Factors
Demand pulls the railway. Lines multiply where farming, industry and trade are already active and the need to move goods is strong. The relationship runs both ways: once a line is built, it carries prosperity into the areas it passes through, which then generate still more traffic.
Political And Administrative Factors
The direction of India’s early railways was set by colonial policy, not by Indian needs. The British built lines chiefly to link the ports with production centres in the interior, so that raw materials could be drawn out to the coast and manufactured goods pushed inward. This gave the network a strong pull towards the three great ports rather than an even, all-India spread.
Political division added its own gaps. Princely states and foreign-ruled enclaves ran their own systems, sometimes on different gauges, and left the map uneven long after the lines themselves were laid.
17.2.3 The Regional Pattern of Railways
Read together, these factors produce a network that is thick in some regions and thin in others. A map of the system shows the pattern at a glance.
Map
Map 17.1 Caption: The railway network of India, densest across the Northern Plain and sparse in the Himalayan and north-eastern regions. Brief: Political outline map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Show the main railway routes as lines, drawn densely across the Northern Plain (Amritsar to Howrah) and the developed parts of the Peninsula, and sparse or absent across the Himalayas and the north-eastern states. Mark the focal junctions Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, Mughalsarai, Patna, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata (Howrah). Key to show route lines and major junctions. Do not show gauges or a separate density legend.
The Northern Plain
The plain running from Amritsar in the north-west to Howrah in the east carries the densest railway network in the country. Level land made construction cheap, while dense population, productive farming, industry and large-scale urbanisation made the demand heavy.
Several junctions act as focal points — Kanpur, Lucknow, Mughalsarai, Agra and Patna. Delhi, however, is the true hub, with lines radiating from it in every direction. Taken as a whole, the plain’s east–west links are better developed than its north–south ones.
The Peninsular Plateau
The plateau’s uneven, hilly surface makes railway building harder, and its population is only moderately dense. Except in Tamil Nadu and the Saurashtra area, where the network is closer, the result is a more open, loosely knit pattern. Its main trunk routes are aligned to give efficient links between the large cities — Mumbai–Chennai, Chennai–Delhi and Chennai–Hyderabad among them.
The Himalayan Region
Railways are practically absent from the Himalayas. Rugged relief, a difficult hill-and-valley grain, sparse population and a slow-growing economy all work against them, and the few lines there are narrow-gauge. Several north-eastern states — among them Tripura, Meghalaya, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh — have historically had little or no rail, their rough, forested terrain making construction slow and costly, though lines have gradually been pushed into the region.
The Coastal Plains
The two coasts differ sharply. A long trunk route runs the length of the eastern coastal plain, which is wide and lies well back from the hills. The western coast, by contrast, long lacked any through line between Mumbai and Kochi, because the Western Ghats crowd close to the shore and leave only a narrow, river-cut strip — the very obstacle this chapter opened with. A continuous west-coast line was completed only late, and at great engineering cost.
17.2.4 Gauges and the Problems of the Railways
Indian railways were built on more than one track width, or gauge. The broad gauge measures 1.676 metres between the rails; the metre gauge, 1.000 metre; and the narrow gauge, 0.762 metre or 0.610 metre. Where two gauges meet, a train cannot simply run through from one onto the other.
This creates the problem of the break of gauge. Goods and passengers must be lifted out of a wagon of one gauge and loaded onto a wagon of the next — a step called transhipment. It is slow and costly, and perishable goods may spoil in the delay. To remove it, most metre-gauge and narrow-gauge lines have been converted to broad gauge, so that a single wagon can now travel from end to end.
Diagram
Fig. 17.2-1 Caption: The three track gauges of Indian railways, drawn to scale; a wagon built for one cannot run on another. Brief: A simple, to-scale schematic showing three pairs of parallel rails seen end-on, stacked one above the other: broad gauge with rails 1.676 m apart, metre gauge 1.000 m apart, and narrow gauge 0.762 m apart. Label each pair with its name and width. Rest a wagon outline on the broad-gauge pair to make the width difference plain. No landscape — a plain technical diagram.
Other problems come with age and with success. Much of the traffic now runs on tracks and bridges laid long ago, many of which have outlived their span and need constant, costly maintenance to stay safe. Traffic keeps rising faster than the lines can easily absorb, and congestion in the largest cities has been one reason for building separate metro rail systems — urban electric railways — to move city crowds.
17.3 Road Transport
Roads reach further than any other mode. A railway needs a level track and a river needs to be navigable, but a road can be cut up a hillside, threaded through a village lane or laid across a desert. India’s road network is the second largest in the world after that of the United States, and it carries the bulk of the country’s short- and medium-distance traffic.
17.3.1 Roads and Railways: Competing or Complementary?
The road’s great strength is flexibility. It offers door-to-door service, carrying goods from the field or factory straight to the buyer with no change of vehicle. A vehicle can stop anywhere and at any time, whereas a train stops only at fixed stations. Roads are also cheaper and quicker to build and maintain than railways, and they can climb steep gradients and take sharp turns, so they reach hill country that rail cannot.
For these reasons the road handles what the railway handles poorly: short hauls, hilly ground, and light or perishable goods such as vegetables, fruit and milk, which must move fast before they spoil.
The road has clear limits too. It is not economical for very long hauls, and heavy, bulky loads like coal and ore are moved far more cheaply by rail. More traffic also brings more accidents and more air pollution from vehicle exhaust.
Put together, these strengths and weaknesses show that roads and railways are not really rivals. Each does the work the other cannot do well, and roads act as feeders to the railways — gathering goods to the railhead and carrying them the last stretch from it.
17.3.2 The Classification of Roads
Indian roads are grouped by their importance and by who builds and maintains them. Six kinds are usually named.
National Highways are the trunk roads built and maintained under the central government, linking state capitals, major cities and ports. They form only a small share of the total road length — about two per cent — yet carry roughly two-fifths of all road traffic, because they take the heaviest through-flows.
State highways are built and maintained by the State governments and connect a state capital with its district headquarters and important towns. District roads join a district headquarters to the other places within the district. Rural, or village, roads connect villages to the nearby towns; they are by far the largest category by length — close to seven-tenths of the whole network — though many are still dusty, unsurfaced tracks. Urban roads serve movement within towns and cities. Border roads, built by the Border Roads Organisation, run through the strategic frontier zones and other difficult terrain.
17.3.3 National Highways and the Golden Quadrilateral
Because the national highways carry so much of the load, the government has made their improvement a national goal. Under the National Highways Development Project, launched in 1999 and carried out by the National Highways Authority of India, long stretches have been widened to four or six lanes.
Its best-known part is the Golden Quadrilateral — a loop of four- and six-lane highway, about 5,846 kilometres in all, joining the four great cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Its four sides are of different lengths; the Chennai–Kolkata side, running along the east, is the longest.
Two long corridors cross the country between the sides of the loop. The North–South Corridor runs from Srinagar in the north to Kanniyakumari at the southern tip, with a spur to Kochi through Salem. The East–West Corridor runs from Silchar in Assam to Porbandar in Gujarat. Together the two corridors total about 7,300 kilometres.
Later programmes have widened these goals. Bharatmala, begun in 2015, aims to build economic corridors and to improve border, coastal and port-connecting roads. Setu Bharatam, of 2016, seeks to make national highways free of level crossings by building road over-bridges and under-bridges where they meet the railway.
17.3.4 The Density and Distribution of Roads
Length alone does not tell how well a place is served. A better measure is road density, the length of road available for each unit of area.
\[\text{Road density} = \frac{\text{Total length of roads}}{\text{Area}} \quad (\text{km of road per } 100\ \text{km}^2)\]
A high figure means roads are close together and most places are within easy reach; a low figure means long gaps between them.
The pattern across India is uneven. Road density is highest in Kerala and the far south, and generally high across the Northern Plain and the Peninsula. It is lowest in the Himalayan states, western Rajasthan and parts of the north-east, where relief, thin population and difficult terrain hold road-building back.
Map
Map 17.2 Caption: The Golden Quadrilateral and the North–South and East–West corridors, the spine of India’s national highway upgrade. Brief: Political outline map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Draw the Golden Quadrilateral as a bold four-sided loop joining Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata (its four sides: Delhi–Mumbai, Mumbai–Chennai, Chennai–Kolkata, Kolkata–Delhi). Draw the North–South Corridor from Srinagar to Kanniyakumari, with the Kochi–Salem spur, and the East–West Corridor from Silchar to Porbandar, in a distinct line style. Label the four quadrilateral cities and the four corridor end-points. Key to distinguish the Quadrilateral from the two corridors.
Map
Map 17.3 Caption: The density of roads across India — high in the south and the plain, low in the Himalayas, the western desert and the north-east (2013). Brief: Choropleth map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Shade states by road density (km of road per 100 km²) in graded tones from low to high. Show the highest densities in Kerala and the far south, moderate to high across the Northern Plain, and the lowest tones across the Himalayan states, western Rajasthan and parts of the north-east. Key to show the density classes and units. Do not print individual figures.
Distribution also depends on what a road is made of. A metalled road has a hard, all-weather surface; an unmetalled one is a bare earth track that turns to mud in the rains. The Northern Plain, though rich and busy, is built of sand, silt and clay and has no stone of its own, so the material for a good surface must be carted in from the hills. The Peninsular Plateau, by contrast, has hard rock close at hand, so a higher share of its roads are metalled.
17.4 Water Transport
Water is the cheapest way to move goods. A boat or ship carries heavy, bulky, low-value loads for a fraction of the cost of road or rail, uses little fuel and pollutes least. Its weakness is speed: water transport is slow, and where haste matters it cannot compete. Movement by water takes two forms — inland, along rivers and canals, and coastal or oceanic, along the coast and across the seas.
17.4.1 Inland Waterways
Inland waterways are routes for boats and ships along the rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks within the land. Before the railway came, they carried much of the country’s traffic. Then road and rail, being faster, took that traffic away, and the waterways fell into neglect. Today they carry only about one per cent of India’s transport, and though efforts are being made to revive them, the work is still at an early stage.
India has roughly 14,500 kilometres of navigable inland waterways, yet most of it is greatly under-used — only a small part of the country’s canals can take mechanised craft. To organise their development, the main routes have been declared National Waterways. The Ganga between Prayagraj and Haldia forms National Waterway 1, and the Brahmaputra between Sadiya and Dhubri forms National Waterway 2; the West Coast Canal in Kerala, and stretches of the Godavari, Krishna and Mahanadi delta systems, form others. A 2016 law declared over a hundred waterways in all, though only a handful are yet developed for real traffic.
Several conditions decide whether a river or canal can carry traffic at all. It must have a steady flow of enough water through the year. Its course must be free of waterfalls, rapids and sharp bends. Silt must not choke it, since a silted bed grows too shallow to sail and desilting is costly. Water drawn off for irrigation must not empty it. And there must be enough demand to make the route pay for itself.
Measured against these conditions, much of India falls short. The rivers of the south are seasonal, running full in the monsoon and drying between, so they suit navigation poorly. It is mainly the deltaic stretches — of the Godavari, the Krishna and the Mahanadi, and the lower Narmada and Tapi — together with the backwaters of Goa and canals such as the Buckingham Canal along the Andhra–Tamil Nadu coast, that carry any inland traffic.
17.4.2 Coastal and Oceanic Routes
India has a long coastline of about 7,500 kilometres and, beyond it, a wide belt of sea. This belt is the country’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) — the stretch of sea, reaching up to 200 nautical miles from the shore, over which a nation holds special rights to use the resources.
Along this coast lie the country’s ports, both large and small. By volume, the great majority of India’s overseas trade — around 95 per cent — moves by sea, because ocean shipping is the only affordable way to carry bulk cargo across the world. Coastal shipping, running from port to port along the Indian coast itself, also carries domestic traffic, and eases the load on the crowded road and rail routes inland.
Map
Map 17.4 Caption: India’s major inland and coastal waterways, including the National Waterways on the Ganga and the Brahmaputra. Brief: Political outline map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Show the main navigable rivers as inland waterways — the Ganga (the Prayagraj–Haldia stretch, National Waterway 1) and the Brahmaputra (Sadiya–Dhubri, National Waterway 2) — together with the West Coast Canal in Kerala and the Godavari–Krishna and Mahanadi delta stretches. Show coastal shipping routes as dashed lines linking the major ports along both coasts. Distinguish inland waterways from coastal routes in the key. Label the Ganga, the Brahmaputra, the West Coast Canal and the major coastal ports.
17.5 Air Transport
Air transport is the fastest mode of all. It has shrunk distances and drawn far-apart places into reach within hours. But it is also the costliest, and its high fares put it beyond the reach of many. For a country as large as India, with wide distances and difficult, varied terrain, flight is nonetheless important — above all for links with the rest of the world. India’s central position between western Europe and Africa on one side, and South-East and East Asia on the other, makes it a natural crossing-point for long-haul air routes.
The Reach And Cost Of Flight
The plane’s advantage is speed and reach. It crosses mountains, deserts and seas that stop or slow surface transport, and it is often the only quick way to reach remote or isolated places. Its drawbacks follow from the same qualities. Flight is expensive to run, carries only limited loads, depends on the weather, and needs costly airports — so it serves mainly the larger cities and the routes where enough people can pay.
Where Air Services Concentrate
Because of these costs, air traffic gathers where demand is greatest. The four metropolitan cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata — are the focal points, with routes radiating from them across the country and abroad. Beyond the cities, air services matter most where surface transport is hardest.
How Air Services Are Run
India’s air transport works in two sectors, domestic and international. The old state-owned carriers have been joined, and now largely overtaken, by private airlines, which since the opening of the sector carry most of the country’s domestic passengers. The airports themselves are managed by the Airports Authority of India. An Open Sky Policy, begun in 1982, allowed foreign carriers to fly in freight and so helped Indian exporters compete abroad. For the most remote places and for offshore work such as the oil rigs at sea, helicopter services extend the reach of air transport where even airports cannot be built.
Map
Map 17.5 Caption: India’s main air routes, radiating from the four metropolitan hubs and reaching remote hills and islands. Brief: Political outline map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Show air routes as lines connecting airports, with the densest bundles radiating from Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. Show thinner routes reaching the north-eastern towns and the Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshadweep islands. Mark international and domestic airports with different symbols in the key. Label the four hub cities and a few outlying airports in the north-east and the islands.
17.6 Pipelines
A pipeline is the quiet workhorse of transport. Once laid, it carries liquids and gases — crude oil, petroleum products, natural gas, even water and milk — in a steady, unbroken flow, with no vehicle, driver or track. Solids too can be moved this way if they are first ground fine and mixed with water into a slurry that will pour through the pipe.
Their Strengths And Weaknesses
Pipelines are ideally suited to fluids. They run continuously, without the stops and delays of road or rail, and can be laid across difficult terrain and even under the sea. They use very little energy, need little maintenance once in place, and, being hidden, are environment-friendly and take up almost no surface land.
Their weaknesses are the other face of these strengths. A pipeline is inflexible: it joins only fixed points and cannot pick up or set down cargo along the way. Its capacity is settled the day it is laid and cannot easily be raised. It is hard to guard along its whole length, and an underground leak is difficult both to find and to repair.
The Pipeline Network In India
Pipeline transport is a fairly new development in India. The first major line, laid in the 1960s, carried crude oil from the Assam oilfields to refineries at Guwahati and Barauni. A dense network later grew up in Gujarat, linking the oilfields to the refinery at Koyali. A long crude line was laid from Salaya in Gujarat to the refinery at Mathura in Uttar Pradesh, and extended further north.
For natural gas, the Gas Authority of India Limited (GAIL) operates the major pipelines. The chief of these is the Hazira–Vijaipur–Jagdishpur (HBJ) gas pipeline, which carries gas landed on the Gujarat coast across the country to fertilizer and power plants in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.
17.7 Ports and Harbours
The coast is India’s window to the world. Nearly all the country’s overseas trade passes across it, and the points where the sea meets the land — the harbours and ports — are among the busiest places in the economy. Before looking at them one by one, two words that are often confused need to be kept apart.
17.7.1 Harbour and Port; Natural and Artificial Harbours
A harbour is a sheltered stretch of water — a bay, a creek, an estuary or an inlet — where ships can lie safe from storms and rough seas. A port is a place on the coast, fitted with docks, warehouses and berths, where cargo is loaded and unloaded and passed between the ships and the land.
The two are not the same. A harbour is about shelter — the calm water itself; a port is about handling — the machinery of trade built around it. A port needs a good harbour to work, but a sheltered harbour with no facilities is not yet a port.
Harbours themselves are of two kinds. A natural harbour is one where the shape of the coast provides shelter on its own: an indented shoreline, or a bay or inlet reaching inland, keeps the water calm without any human work. An artificial harbour is one built where the coast offers no such shelter — made by dredging the seabed deeper and raising breakwaters, or sea walls, against the waves.
17.7.2 The Major Ports of India
India has around a dozen major ports, managed by the central government, and some two hundred smaller ports run by the States. The major ports handle the great bulk of the country’s sea-borne foreign trade. They are strung along both coasts; the syllabus asks us to look closely at four of the greatest — two on the west coast and two on the east.
Mumbai, on the west coast, grew up around a fine natural harbour whose deep water, free of sandbanks, lets large ships enter easily. It has long been India’s premier port, facing the busy sea lanes to the Gulf and to Europe — routes that the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought much closer. Behind it lies a vast, rich hinterland, and through it move exports such as cotton textiles and imports such as crude oil and machinery. Beside it, a modern deep-water container port at Jawaharlal Nehru was built to take the overflow.
Kochi, further south on the Kerala coast, is another natural harbour, sheltered within a calm backwater lagoon. Its safe, deep anchorage sits astride the southern sea routes. It exports tea, coffee and spices drawn from the hills behind it, and imports mineral oil and fertilizers.
Chennai, on the east coast, is the opposite case. It has no natural harbour at all; an artificial one was built there, one of the oldest in the country, by dredging and raising sea walls. It handles petroleum, fertilizers, iron ore and general cargo for a large southern hinterland, but the water is shallower than at Mumbai, and cyclones in October and November often halt shipping.
Kolkata is a riverine port, lying about 128 kilometres up the Hooghly from the sea. Reaching so far inland made it the ‘Gateway to Eastern India’, and it became the country’s chief centre of the jute trade. But that same inland setting is also its difficulty, as the next case shows.
17.7.3 Hinterlands and the Direction of Trade
A port cannot live on the sea alone. What keeps it busy is the land behind it — its hinterland, the inland region from which it draws the goods it exports and to which it sends the goods it imports. A rich, productive, well-connected hinterland fills a port with cargo; a poor, small or badly linked one leaves it idle.
This is why two ports on the same coast can fare so differently. It also decides the very nature of a port’s trade: what its hinterland grows and makes becomes its exports, and what that hinterland lacks becomes its imports. Over recent years India’s export mix has leaned more towards manufactured and engineering goods and refined petroleum products, while crude oil has stayed its single largest import — and each port carries the particular blend its own hinterland demands.
The lesson is that a port’s fortune is not fixed by its past greatness. The same river that built the city can also strand it, for silting is a physical process that no volume of trade can overrule. Keeping the eastern gateway open has taken constant dredging, a great barrage upstream and, in the end, a whole second port downstream.
Map
Map 17.6 Caption: The major ports of India, ranged along the west and east coasts, with the four great trading ports highlighted. Brief: Political outline map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Mark the major ports with dots and labels — on the west coast: Kandla (Deendayal), Mumbai, Jawaharlal Nehru, Marmagao, New Mangaluru, Kochi; on the east coast: Kolkata, Haldia, Paradip, Visakhapatnam, Chennai, Tuticorin (V.O. Chidambaranar) and Ennore (Kamarajar). Highlight Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Kochi with a bolder symbol. Show the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the coastline. Key to distinguish the major ports from the four highlighted trading ports.
17.8 Communication
Communication is the transmission of messages, ideas and information from one place to another. It differs from transport in a simple but deep way: transport carries goods and people bodily, while communication carries only the message. A truck moves the grain; a phone call moves the news that the grain has arrived.
For most of history the two went together. A message travelled only as fast as the person or letter carrying it — by foot, by animal, by boat, later by rail. Communication depended on transport. Telecommunication — the sending of messages as electric or radio signals, by telegraph, telephone, radio, television and satellite — broke that dependence. The message now moves as a signal, almost instantly, whether or not any vehicle makes the journey.
This freedom matters for development. Communication spreads information and education, carries market prices to the farmer and weather warnings to the coast, and binds rural and urban life together. In an emergency it flashes the news across the country so that relief can be rushed to the spot. Extending it to every village — the aim of programmes such as Digital India — is now treated as a task as basic as building roads.
Communication is of two kinds. Personal communication passes between individuals; mass communication reaches great numbers of people at once.
Flowchart
Fig. 17.8-1 Caption: The two branches of communication and their main means. Nodes: Communication → two kinds. Personal communication (individual to individual) → postal services / telephone / mobile phones. Mass communication (to the many at once) → radio / television / press and print media / cinema. Both branches are now carried increasingly by satellites and the internet.
17.8.1 Personal Communication and Telecommunication
Personal communication links one person to another. Its oldest organised form is the postal service, still the most widely used means of communication in the country, and one that reaches deep into the villages where little else does. Faster tiers such as speed post, and the Postal Index Number (PIN) that directs each letter, have quickened its work.
Telecommunication carries the personal message as a signal instead of on paper. The telephone, invented in 1876, let two people speak directly across any distance over which a wire, or later a radio link, could be laid. Its greatest recent leap has been the mobile, or cellular, phone.
The cellular phone spread so fast because it needs no wire running to each user. Where laying telephone cable was slow and costly — across scattered villages, hills and remote settlements — a signal from a nearby tower reaches the handset directly. One small device now carries voice, text and the internet together, which is why the mobile phone has reached places the old landline never did.
17.8.2 Mass Communication
Mass communication carries a single message to very many people at the same time. Its main media are radio, television, the press and cinema, backed today by the internet. In India the public service broadcaster, Prasar Bharati, runs the two oldest of these — All India Radio and the television service Doordarshan.
Radio is especially powerful in a country like India. It is cheap, needs no reading, and reaches remote areas that other media do not, so it carries news, farming advice and warnings out to the villages; All India Radio broadcasts in many languages and dialects in order to do so. Television, through Doordarshan and many other channels, reaches a wide audience with news, education and entertainment, and matters greatly where literacy is low and languages are many.
Beyond informing and entertaining, mass communication shapes development. It spreads awareness, supports education and helps knit a large and varied country into a single whole.
17.8.3 Satellites, Remote Sensing and GIS
The newest means of communication and of gathering information rest on the satellite. Satellites have transformed telephone, television and data links, carrying signals between distant places that no cable joins. India runs two great satellite systems: the Indian National Satellite System (INSAT), used for telecommunication, broadcasting and weather-watching, and the Indian Remote Sensing (IRS) satellites, used to survey the country’s resources. Both are built and launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation.
Remote sensing is the gathering of information about the Earth’s surface from a distance, by sensors carried on satellites or aircraft, without touching the ground at all. Because different surfaces — crops, soil, water, forest — reflect light differently, a remote-sensing image lets geographers map and monitor land use, and watch it change over time.
A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a computer system that captures, stores, analyses and displays information tied to particular places on a map. By layering data — say, soil, rainfall, roads and population — over the same ground, a GIS helps planners answer questions about where things are and why, and manage resources wisely. Together, remote sensing and GIS have become basic tools of modern geography.
17.9 Infrastructure and the Industrial Economy
Every industry rests on a base it did not build. Before a single machine turns, the raw materials must arrive, the workers must reach the site, and the finished goods must find their way to buyers. All of this is the work of infrastructure — transport and communication — which is why a country’s industrial growth can rise no higher than the network beneath it.
Transport decides this most directly. Cheap, dependable transport is needed to bring raw materials and labour to the factory and to carry the products away to market. Where it is missing, no industry can grow; where it is good, industry follows.
The pull is strongest for industries that work with heavy, bulky, low-value materials. Take iron and steel, which draws together coal, iron ore, manganese and limestone — all heavy and cheap, none able to bear a high freight cost. A steel plant must therefore sit where transport can assemble these materials cheaply, and it grows only alongside the roads, railways and lines that feed it.
Because of this, transport and industry grow side by side, each helping the other. Good transport draws industry to a place; the industry then generates so much traffic that still more transport is justified; and the new transport draws yet more industry.
Flowchart
Fig. 17.9-1 Caption: Transport and industry grow together in a loop, each drawing on the other. Nodes: Cheap, dependable transport reaches a place → industry locates there → the industry generates a heavy flow of materials and goods → the extra traffic justifies still more and better transport → yet more industry is drawn in → back to the start, so the cluster grows with each turn.
This is also why India’s early large-scale industry clustered around the great port cities and along the main trunk routes. These were the best-connected places in the country, able to gather raw materials from a wide area and to send goods out to distant and overseas markets. Once industry took hold there, the advantage compounded, and those regions still lead today.
Communication completes the base that transport begins. A modern industry cannot run on the movement of goods alone; it depends on the swift movement of information — orders, prices, designs, payments and instructions — between suppliers, factories, banks and markets that may lie far apart. Telephone, internet and satellite links let a firm coordinate work spread across many places, as no earlier industry could.
Infrastructure, then, is not something added to an economy after it has grown rich. It is the ground the economy grows from. A well-knit web of transport and communication turns scattered resources, workers and markets into a single working system — and that, in the end, is what industrial development requires.
17.10 Summary
Infrastructure — transport and communication — is the base on which every other economic activity rests. Transport links production at one end to consumption at the other, and each mode is suited to a different load and a different distance.
Rail is the main artery for heavy, long-distance, bulk traffic. Where it runs and how densely is decided by the land (plains invite it, mountains, deserts and rivers resist it), by demand, and by a colonial history that pulled the lines towards the ports. The network is densest on the Northern Plain and thin in the Himalayas and the north-east.
The break of gauge — the need to tranship goods where two track widths meet — long slowed the railways; converting most lines to broad gauge has eased it.
Roads reach everywhere and give door-to-door service, and they are partners of the railways rather than rivals: they gather traffic and carry it the first and last mile to the railhead. National highways carry about 40 per cent of the road traffic on about 2 per cent of the length; the Golden Quadrilateral and the North–South and East–West Corridors are the national goal for high-speed links.
Road density is highest in the wet, crowded states such as Kerala and lowest in the mountains, deserts and thinly peopled frontiers — and the Northern Plain, though it has the most roads, must import its road-building stone.
Water is the cheapest way to move heavy bulk, yet it carries only about one per cent of India’s traffic, held back by seasonal rivers, silting, falls and the draw-off of water for irrigation. The main inland waterways run on the Ganga, the Brahmaputra and the West Coast Canal; the open sea carries about 95 per cent of overseas trade by weight.
Air transport is the fastest and the costliest mode, and its advantage is greatest exactly where surface transport is hardest — the mountains, the north-east and the islands. Its busiest routes fan out from the metro hubs.
Pipelines carry liquids and gases (and solids as slurry) cheaply and steadily, but they are fixed and inflexible; their map is the map of oilfields, refineries and gas-using plants.
A harbour is the sheltered water; a port is the trading facility built to use it. Harbours may be natural or artificial. A port lives on its hinterland — the inland region it serves — and it is the hinterland, together with transport links and position, that decides whether a port thrives or, like a silting Kolkata, struggles.
Communication carries the message, not the body, and so differs from transport. It broke free of transport through the telegraph, telephone, radio, television and finally the satellite. It runs as personal communication (post, telephone, mobile) and mass communication (radio, Doordarshan, press, cinema), while satellites, remote sensing and GIS now map and manage the land.
Infrastructure is the key to an industrial economy. Transport assembles raw materials and delivers goods, and helps choose where industry settles; communication coordinates it; and the clustering that follows draws still more infrastructure, keeping the well-connected regions ahead.
Flowchart
Fig. 17.10-1 Caption: The whole chapter as one chain — the forces that shape the network, and the way the network shapes the economy in return. Nodes: The land, the economy and history shape the transport network → each mode is matched to the loads and distances it carries best (rail for heavy bulk, road for the last mile, water cheapest but slow, air fastest but dearest, pipelines for liquids and gas) → ports link land and sea and live on their hinterlands → communication breaks free of transport and now runs on satellites, remote sensing and GIS → together, transport and communication decide where industry can grow → industry, once clustered, draws still more infrastructure → back to shaping the network.
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
A state-level figure hides the district and the village inside it: a state’s road density averages the crowded city and the empty tract into a single number, and says nothing about whether the roads are surfaced or fit to use. A network map shows where lines run, not how much moves along them, so a quiet line and a busy one look the same. And figures like the one per cent carried by waterways or the 40 per cent of traffic on the national highways are snapshots of a moment; they shift from year to year, and the models that explain where industry gathers tell us the tendency, not exactly where the next plant will be built.
17.11 Key Terms
Agglomeration — the clustering of industries and activities in one place so that they can share the same roads, rail and other services.
Artificial harbour — a sheltered harbour made by people, by dredging the sea bed and building a breakwater against the waves.
Break of gauge — the point where two railway lines of different track width meet, so that a train cannot run straight through from one onto the other.
Breakwater — a wall built out into the sea to hold back the waves and shelter a harbour.
Centrifugal forces — the pulls towards separateness that distance and difference can build up in a large and varied country.
Coastal shipping — the movement of goods by ship from one port of a country to another along its own coast.
Communication — the transmission of messages, words and ideas from one place or person to another.
Exclusive Economic Zone — the belt of sea off a coast over which a country holds rights to the resources.
Fare — the charge a railway makes for carrying a passenger.
Freight — the charge a railway makes for carrying goods and luggage.
Geographic Information System (GIS) — a computer system that captures, stores, analyses and displays information tied to location on a map.
Golden Quadrilateral — the ring of four- and six-lane highway joining Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
Harbour — a sheltered stretch of water, such as a creek, bay or inlet, where ships can lie safe from the open sea.
Hinterland — the inland region whose goods flow out through a port and whose imports flow in through it.
Infrastructure — the basic facilities, such as roads, railways, ports and communication networks, on which other economic activity depends.
Inland waterways — the navigable rivers, canals, backwaters and creeks within a country.
Mass communication — communication that sends a single message outward to a large, scattered audience all at once.
Metalled road — a road given a hard, surfaced, all-weather layer, as against an unmetalled, dusty track.
National Highways — the main trunk roads, built and maintained through the central government, connecting state capitals, large cities and major ports.
National Waterways — inland waterways formally declared for development as routes of national importance.
Natural harbour — a sheltered harbour formed by the coast itself, where an inlet or backwater gives deep, calm water.
Port — a place on the coast, with docks, warehouses and berths, where cargo is loaded and unloaded and passed to and from the interior.
Remote sensing — gathering information about the earth’s surface from a distance, by sensors on satellites or aircraft, without touching the ground.
Road density — the length of road for each unit of area, measured in kilometres of road per 100 square kilometres.
Slurry — solids ground fine and mixed with water so that they flow like a liquid and can be pumped through a pipeline.
Telecommunication — communication carried over a distance by electrical or electronic means, such as the telephone.
Transhipment — unloading goods from a carrier of one kind or gauge and reloading them onto another to continue the journey.
Transport — the organised movement of passengers and goods from one place to another.
17.12 Points to Ponder
If a good transport link makes a region prosper, and that prosperity then attracts still better links, how can a poorly connected region ever break out of the cycle it is caught in?
The Konkan coast waited more than a century for its railway. Was the line finally built because engineering became able, or because the traffic at last made it worth the cost — and how could you tell which?
Each mode of transport is best at some one thing: cheapest, or fastest, or able to reach the hardest places. If a single new mode were both cheaper and faster than all the others, would the rest vanish, or is there always a task left for each?
A port can be undone by a river silting hundreds of kilometres inland, or by a rival that captures its hinterland. Is a port really a place on the coast, or an inland region that happens to touch the sea?
A state’s average road density can look healthy while a district within it has almost no roads at all. When a country plans for ‘the average’, who is it that disappears into that average?
17.13 Objective Questions
- The mode of transport best suited to carrying heavy, bulky, low-value goods most cheaply over long distances is: [1 mark]
- air transport
- road transport
- rail and water transport
- helicopter services
- The Golden Quadrilateral joins which set of cities by high-speed highway? [1 mark]
- Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata
- Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata
- Mumbai, Chennai, Kochi and Kolkata
- Delhi, Kanpur, Nagpur and Chennai
- A harbour made by dredging the sea bed and building a wall against the waves is: [1 mark]
- a natural harbour
- an artificial harbour
- a riverine port
- a backwater
- The ‘break of gauge’ problem arises because: [1 mark]
- tracks are electrified
- railways were built on more than one track width
- bridges have grown too old
- trains carry too heavy a load
- Roughly what share of India’s overseas trade, measured by weight, moves by sea? [1 mark]
- about 25 per cent
- about 50 per cent
- about 75 per cent
- about 95 per cent
- Choose the correct option:
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. Assertion (A): Railways are almost absent from the Himalayan region. Reason (R): The rugged relief and steep gradients there make railway construction difficult and costly. [1 mark]
- Choose the correct option:
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. Assertion (A): Inland waterways carry only a small share of India’s traffic. Reason (R): Many Indian rivers are seasonal and their beds silt up, making navigation unreliable. [1 mark]
- Match each term in Column A with its description in Column B: [1 mark]
| Column A | Column B |
|---|---|
| a. Hinterland | i. solids ground fine and mixed with water to flow through a pipe |
| b. Slurry | ii. the inland region a port serves |
| c. Remote sensing | iii. moving goods by ship between a country’s own ports |
| d. Coastal shipping | iv. gathering surface information from sensors far above the ground |
Fill in the blank: National highways make up only about two per cent of the total road length, but carry roughly ______ per cent of the road traffic. [1 mark]
State whether the following is true or false: Communication and transport are the same thing, since both move something from one place to another. [1 mark]
17.14 Check Your Concepts
Define the term ‘hinterland’. [2 marks]
State two advantages and two disadvantages of pipelines as a means of transport. [2 marks]
List the six categories into which Indian roads are classified. [2 marks]
Differentiate between a natural harbour and an artificial harbour, giving one Indian example of each. [3 marks]
Explain why roads and railways are said to be complementary rather than competing. [3 marks]
Give reasons why inland waterways carry so small a share of India’s traffic, even though they are the cheapest way to move heavy goods. [3 marks]
Explain what national goal the Golden Quadrilateral, together with the North–South and East–West Corridors, is meant to achieve. [4 marks]
‘Air transport’s advantage is greatest exactly where surface transport is hardest.’ Evaluate this claim with examples from India. [4 marks]
Describe the geographical, economic and political factors that have shaped the distribution of the railway network in India. Name one well-served and one poorly served region in support of your answer. [6 marks]
‘A port lives on its hinterland.’ Discuss this statement with reference to Indian ports, explaining what decides whether a port thrives or declines. [6 marks]
17.15 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
- Study Map 17.1, the railway network of India.
- Name two regions where the network is dense and two where it is sparse. [2 marks]
- Give one reason for the contrast between them. [1 mark]
- State one thing this map cannot tell you about the railways. [1 mark] [4 marks]
- Suppose a state has a total road length of 60,000 km and an area of 40,000 km².
- Using the road-density formula given in the chapter, calculate its road density in kilometres per 100 square kilometres. Show your working. [2 marks]
- State whether this is a high or a low density compared with the national average, and suggest one factor that could explain it. [2 marks] [4 marks]
- Study Fig. 17.8-1, the flowchart of remote sensing and a geographic information system.
- In your own words, describe the steps by which a satellite image becomes useful for planning. [2 marks]
- State the difference in role between remote sensing and GIS. [1 mark] [3 marks]
- Look at Map 17.2, which shows the Golden Quadrilateral and the two corridors.
- Name the end-points of the North–South Corridor and of the East–West Corridor. [2 marks]
- Explain how these corridors differ in purpose from the Golden Quadrilateral itself. [1 mark] [3 marks]