How India's shift to a car-centric transport model is derailing national mobility

For a vast number of migrant workers, travel has always involved hardship and a struggle for space. However, the recent proliferation of images of trains packed way beyond capacity, passengers clinging to any available space, and desperate crowds pushing, shoving, even becoming violent in their struggle to board suggests that the malaise has worsened. Stories are emerging of nightmarish journeys, where children wail through the night in the sheer crush of bodies and exhausted travellers are forced to stand for hours. For some, the chaos of these trains evokes haunting parallels to another time finishing in 1915, to the frantic,…