Anomalies in railway rates

THE serious harm done to Indian industries and trade by the preferential treatment given by railway companies to foreign goods by offering easier rates to them than to the products of Indian industries has again and again been brought to the notice of the government. At the recent annual meeting of the Railway Conference Association, the President tried to justify the existing anomalies in the freight rates by saying that the Railways offered lower rates to large traffic passing between the port towns and important trade centres in India, because it paid them to do so. He said nothing, however, about the effect of this policy on the Indian industries, which cannot flourish on account of the higher rates they have to pay for sending out their products to trading centres. It is worthy of note that Sir Charles Innes in his speech disapproved of the railway policy, though he has done nothing yet to secure a revision of rates on a just and equitable basis. It is to be hoped that the representation which has just been made to the Railway Board on this subject by the mill owners and merchants of Sholapur will induce the authorities to take necessary action and remedy the long-standing evil. What serious injury is done to Indian industries by the anomalies in the railway rates can be easily seen from some of the glaring examples given in the representation. The merchants point out that Sholapur is an industrial centre having five cotton spinning and weaving mills and an extensive handloom industry, producing 2¼  lakh maunds of cloth and 1½  lakh maunds of yarn a year. The manufactured goods have to be sent to trading centres such as Amritsar, Delhi, Jubbalpur, Calcutta, Madras, Madurai, Hubli etc., but the mills cannot do this effectively on account of the much heavier freight rates demanded from them by railway companies as compared with the rates from port towns to those very centres of trade.