‘Laying down the rails’ on the Bhor Ghat (valley) Incline, 13 miles of daunting mountain terrain on the Great Indian Peninsula Railway line between Bombay and Pune, shortly before it opened in 1863. At its peak, the construction was employing 42,000 men, but over the eight-year project there were thousands of fatalities from accident and disease: cholera repeatedly struck the shanty towns and without modern machinery or climbing gear scaling the vertiginous cliffs was often fatal. For comparison, the 73-mile-long Settle to Carlisle line along the Pennines in England took six years to build, and was marred by about 200 casualties.
FOLLOW him to his own home in some remote Deccan or Concan village, and you will find the railway labourer has carried to his own village not only new modes of working, new wants, and a new feeling of self-respect and independence, but new ideas of what Government and the laws intend to secure to him; and he is, I believe, a better and more loyal subject, as he is certainly a more useful labourer.*
Let us add to this effect on the labouring population the inevitable and irresistible tendency of railways to break the bonds of caste and to destroy the isolation in which the various classes and races of natives have hitherto lived, and you have an aggregate of moral results such as may well be the subject of grave thought to those who are interested in the future of India.*
Too many employers then (as now) underpaid and overworked their employees in the mistaken belief that this was good business. See Frere’s comments on the railway revolution’s impact on wages in Money Well Spent, and Adam Smith on The Economic Case for Generous Wages and The Economic Case for Time Off. And see Fuel of Freedom, where economist Alfred Marshall argues that coal and steam power played at least as much part in the end of social oppression as political reform did.
It is certainly true that from this time onwards the social and economic progress of India’s Princely States gathered pace: see Progressive Travancore and Mysore’s Golden Age. Samuel Smiles agreed that the railways played an important part: see Britain’s Best Gift to India. But we should also bear in mind that London had recently abandoned using the East India Company as its exclusive agent, and was beginning to allow competition and free trade in place of its rigorously enforced colonial single market.
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