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🔬 Science & TechMAINS · GS3.9 · GS3.12

Vande Bharat carries nearly 4 crore in a year

Indian Railways' indigenous semi-high-speed network posted about 34% passenger growth in FY 2025-26, crossing 9.1 crore riders since its 2019 debut.

What happened

Background & context

Vande Bharat Express is India's first indigenously designed and manufactured semi-high-speed train, conceived as Train 18 during its development phase and rolled out from the Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Chennai, a Railways production unit. The first service was flagged off on the New Delhi-Varanasi route in February 2019, and the train was later named Vande Bharat ("Salute to India"). It is built under the Make in India initiative, with a steadily rising share of domestic components, and is meant to replace ageing inter-city services such as the Shatabdi class on day-journey corridors.

The defining feature of the platform is that it is a self-propelled trainset — the traction equipment is distributed under the coaches (Electric Multiple Unit / "distributed power" design) rather than concentrated in a separate locomotive at the front. This lets the train accelerate and brake faster than a conventional locomotive-hauled rake, which is what allows it to cut journey times even on existing tracks. The chair-car version is the most widely deployed; the Vande Bharat Sleeper, introduced in January 2026, extends the platform to overnight long-distance travel, and a shorter Vande Metro (later branded Namo Bharat Rapid Rail) variant targets dense short-haul inter-city commuting. Together these form the Vande Bharat family of trainsets.

The programme sits inside a broader Railways modernisation push that also includes the Amrit Bharat (a non-air-conditioned, push-pull long-distance trainset for affordable travel) and the Kavach automatic train protection system. Reading Vande Bharat against these siblings matters for the exam: each addresses a different segment — premium inter-city day travel, affordable long-distance travel, and safety signalling respectively — and they are frequently confused.

It also helps to place Vande Bharat in the lineage of premium fast trains it succeeds. The Rajdhani Express introduced fast, fully air-conditioned long-distance travel between the capital and state capitals from the late 1960s; the Shatabdi Express, from the late 1980s, served same-day inter-city return journeys with chair-car seating; and the Gatimaan Express became the country's fastest service on the Delhi-Agra section in the 2010s. All three are conventional locomotive-hauled rakes. Vande Bharat is the indigenous trainset designed to take over and extend the day-journey, chair-car role those services pioneered, while raising acceleration and on-board comfort. Knowing this chain — Rajdhani → Shatabdi → Gatimaan → Vande Bharat — is the kind of ordering and pairing a Prelims question can test.

The Sleeper variant, highlighted in this release, is significant because it pushes the trainset concept into the overnight long-distance market that was previously the domain of locomotive-hauled Rajdhani and mail/express rakes. Recording above-100% occupancy across its first 119 trips in three months indicates strong early uptake. The cumulative figure of more than 9.1 crore passengers across roughly 1 lakh trips, meanwhile, is a measure of how far the network has scaled from a single 2019 service to a fleet running on dozens of routes across most major States.

For Prelims

For UPSC: Vande Bharat = India's first indigenously designed semi-high-speed trainset (NDLS-Varanasi, Feb 2019), a self-propelled EMU built under Make in India — distinct from the separate Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet-train (HSR) project. Remember the family: Express (chair car) → Sleeper (Jan 2026) → Vande Metro.

Why it matters

The reported numbers carry exam value because they quantify a flagship indigenisation story. A 34% year-on-year jump in ridership, on top of a cumulative base above 9 crore, signals that the platform has moved beyond a showcase product into a routine inter-city option on busy corridors. The concentration of traffic on pilgrimage and commercial routes — Varanasi, Vaishno Devi Katra, the Secunderabad-Visakhapatnam industrial belt — shows the network is being deployed where day-journey demand is densest rather than spread thinly.

The deeper significance is what the train demonstrates about domestic engineering capacity. Building a self-propelled trainset in-country, scaling it to a sleeper version for overnight travel within a few years, and recording above-100% occupancy on that new sleeper variant in its first quarter, together make a concrete case for the Make in India approach in heavy transport equipment. It also addresses a real problem: India's mainline passenger fleet has long relied on locomotive-hauled rakes with slower acceleration, capping average speeds on shared track. A distributed-traction trainset is the affordable way to raise effective speeds without first building costly dedicated high-speed corridors everywhere — a pragmatic middle path between status-quo express trains and full HSR.

There is also an economic-geography dimension worth carrying. The busiest corridors map onto two distinct kinds of demand: pilgrimage traffic (Varanasi, and Vaishno Devi via Katra) and commercial inter-city flows (the Secunderabad-Visakhapatnam belt, Chennai-Mysuru). This shows how a faster, more comfortable service can simultaneously serve religious tourism and business travel, both of which feed local economies along the route. For an answer on infrastructure-led growth, the point is that the social return on a railway upgrade is not only the time saved by passengers but the activity it supports at either end of the line. Rising ridership of a public, energy-efficient electric mode also has an environmental angle: shifting inter-city journeys from road and air to electrified rail lowers per-passenger emissions, linking the story to sustainable transport.

For Mains

Substantiation
The FY 2025-26 figures (~3.98 crore passengers, ~34% growth, 9.1 crore cumulative) are ready data points for answers on infrastructure-led growth and the performance of Railways modernisation (GS3.9, infrastructure: railways).
Exemplification
Vande Bharat is a clean worked example of indigenisation and Make in India in heavy engineering — a self-propelled trainset designed and built domestically and then extended into a sleeper variant (GS3.12, indigenisation / developing new technology).
Position
The government's stance, as stated, is that rising ridership validates a strategy of upgrading the existing network with semi-high-speed trainsets rather than relying solely on costly dedicated HSR corridors.
Problematisation
The traffic concentration on a handful of corridors invites the counter-question of equitable spread, last-mile connectivity, and whether premium fares limit inclusiveness — a gap to acknowledge in a balanced answer.
Way forward
The Sleeper roll-out and the planned Vande Metro variant point to the next step: extending the trainset model across day, overnight and short-haul segments so that effective speeds rise network-wide without waiting for dedicated HSR track everywhere.
Deploys into: infrastructure (railways) and indigenisation of new technology — Vande Bharat as the headline example of domestically engineered semi-high-speed rail and rising public-transport demand.
Ministry of Railways · 2026-04-10 · PRID 2250963 · PIB source ↗