LAHORE:
It’s been six months since the launch of the latest private train and it has already taken much load off Pakistan Railways. Pak Business Express has paid Rs516 million to Pakistan Railways for using its rail network for running its train.
The amount Pak Business Express paid to Pakistan Railways is more than the grand total it made from all other trains combined, Mian Shafqat Ali, director of the company told The Express Tribune.
It is also enough to cover losses of Railways for five of the past six months as the state-owned enterprise announced earlier this week that it incurs a loss of Rs100 million a month.
The private company Four Brothers entered into a deal with Pakistan Railways in 2011 and made a Rs225 million investment in the project. The privately-run train is bound to pay between Rs1.3 million and Rs1.5 million per day to the Railways.
The success of Pak Business Express has added a new page to public-private partnership as the private sector run train is providing much-needed funds to Pakistan Railways at a time when it’s facing a huge financial deficit and many of its trains are waiting to be fixed in the workshops.
Ali said that the very objective behind this venture was revival of railways and bringing back the lost glory once attached to it.
He said that Pak Business Express has so far spent Rs170.65 million to improve services for passengers such as establishing waiting lounges and canteens among others.
Pak Business Express has also spent a big amount to reduce travel time between Lahore and Karachi, Ali said. The train is currently the fastest train in its route.
“Time is the biggest issue for train commuters and the management of Pak Business Express has focused on this issue vigorously and this is the only reason that the occupancy of this privately sector run train is improving with every passing day,” he said.
The service reached 70% occupancy as of February 2012, slightly away from the 88% occupancy that it targets to achieve.
Ali said that the success of Pak Business Express has opened up new doors of public-private partnership and it is an achievement that now Pakistan Railways has offered more trains to the private sector.
Published in The Express Tribune, September 8th, 2012.
COMMENTS (7)
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I wonder how much the company paid to get this article published. Very sad to see such things happen in such a good newspaper like yours. Please i beg don't publish such articles which are based on total fabrication. Once again i hope you take my complain seriously as you will lose your readership tremendously if this continues.
I think we are getting too pessimist. There are good things happening and we should appreciate and encourage those things and people. Business Express Train was always a good move, it usually is just a matter of time that general acceptance of things prevail. It's a good move by the Government and they should implement this throughout Pakistan... Goverment's job should just be providing Platform and Monitoring/Controlling of facilities. I bet similar model could be succesful in every other Government Organization(Railway, PIA, Steel Mills etc.). TELSTRA which used to be completely Government owned (now a Public lmited company) is one of the multi-billion dollar TELECOM company in Australia. It is the backbone of Telecom Industry. Now, Telstra doesnt have very popular products of its own compared with other Mobile/Broadband Service providers in Australia but it provides the infrastructure to all the other Mobile/Broadband service providers. Consequently every Mobile/Broadband service provider has to use TELSTRA's infrastructure which is really profitable for TELSTRA. If TELSTRA had relied on its own products it would have been not where it is today. Throughtout the world, Government tries to minimize direct involvement in producing end products. They always provide Infrastructure, licences, permits etc. and let the Private sector use Government's platform. Both make money and generate economic activity...
Pakistan needs to do a lot of that to curb the inefficiencies in the Government sector.
The people who have traveled on this train have enjoyed their journey and have only good words for this train
Railway is intentionally destryoed when these politicians come into power. Since if railway runs properly who will use their buses.
To counter this i think this is a better model, let the bus companies run trains as well. In this case they will earn and people will be satisified. And government should just maintain tracks and administrative control.
Otherwise this war between trains and buses will never end.
just_someone: Yeah there were quite a few negative stories on ET about the Pak business express train service. Now all of a sudden it's all good news.
just a bit ago i read you guys write that the private public model was not working for the railways. now you have a item that shows completely otherwise. et, have some editorial standards when you have your 'reporters' write things. also, this is another example of how privatization is the need of the hr for all public enterprises. these companies are teh biggest way for politicians to earn money through corruption. this is why they are not willing to sell them. we need to push them to sell them, it will be for the governments benefit and people would get cheaper and better service!
Overall Private sector does better then public sector anywhere in the world. More encouragement should be given to private sector.