THE government should seriously look into the offer by a Chinese company to help turn around the collapsing Pakistan Railways. In an interview with a Pakistani wire service, a senior official of Sinotec Song Shuangping stated that his company had a “plan to steer the decades-old railways system out of the crisis and make a profitable entity”. The plan suggests strengthening of the existing railway tracks and usage of electric locomotives to reduce the travelling time and significantly save the railway’s expenditure on running its trains. The Chinese company, which has been working on different power projects in Pakistan for the last 10 years, says the train network can later be extended up to the Gwadar port for the transportation of goods to other parts of the country. If implemented, it should reduce the country’s oil import bill, decrease the heavy traffic load on the highways, provide swifter and economical travel facility to the passengers, and, importantly, increase profitability. The president of the company met Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif during his recent visit to China. It is hoped that the government will also explore the possibility of Chinese cooperation for the revival of the railway when a delegation of the company visits Pakistan next month.

The railway is in a deep mess and its turnaround requires a lot of money, hard work and technical expertise. The previous government had also initiated a few reforms to involve the private sector to provide better travel facilities to the passengers and steer the department out of financial crisis, but no tangible results have so far been achieved. The new government has promised to restructure PR and revive it in the shortest possible time. As a first measure, it allocated Rs30bn for the railway in the budget for this year and cut the fares to attract more passengers. But the government’s turnaround plan will take a while to yield results. Chinese cooperation can be a quicker route to the railway’s recovery.