India is trying to build its industries, and freight gets priority over people. Thanks to this priority, most of the outdated freight cars have been replaced and the total number has increased by 40,000 in the past ten years, but freight capacity is still inadequate. Businessmen complain that they have to wait three months for a freight car to carry their goods and that, at times, when a car is made available they have to wait another month before it can be attached to a passing train. They also complain that the movement of freight cars is so chaotic that even after goods are dispatched it might take a month for the shipment to arrive at a destination only five hundred miles away. The shortage of freight cars is a major cause of governmental corruption.
Businessmen say that the only way they can get a car is by bribing railway officials.
Governmental inefficiency is the keynote. All of the interstate communications are owned by the central government, and many of the individual states have nationalized interurban bus and truck lines as well as their municipal transport systems. Yet entering a government office is like stepping back fifty years or more. There are few filing cabinets and paper clips. Papers are attached by a string threaded through a hole in one corner and then wrapped in a folder tied together by another string.