I paid a superfast surcharge last month and somewhere around Agra I finally asked myself what the word superfast legally means in this country, because the answer deserves to be printed on the ticket itself. Indian Railways decided in May 2007 that any train averaging 55 kilometers per hour across its entire journey qualifies as superfast on broad gauge, and that is the bar, fifty five, a speed at which a bicycle on a gentle slope starts feeling competitive. The Comptroller and Auditor General examined this benchmark in an audit report and called it quite low, which is government speak for indefensible, and found 123 trains carrying the superfast label while being timetabled below the threshold, collecting surcharges from passengers for speed that nobody ever received, and a parliamentary committee earlier this year recommended the whole classification be reviewed because even the people who oversee the railways cannot defend the number anymore.

Here is the thing about slow trains though, and this is the part that never makes it into the inaugural speeches, slowness is congestion wearing a uniform. Track time is finite and a train crawling at 55 occupies a section twice as long as one running at 110, so every slow superfast physically blocks a path another train could have used, which is why the whole network suffocates together. The Standing Committee on Railways reported in December 2024 that freight trains have averaged 25 kilometers per hour for eleven straight years, a number so static it reads like a typo, and those freight rakes share tracks with passenger trains, so a coal wagon doing 25 drags down every express stacked behind it. Throughput is capacity multiplied by speed and we keep adding coaches to trains that refuse to go faster, which is like widening a parking lot and calling it a highway. Even our flagship Vande Bharat, designed for 180 and permitted 160, returned an average of 84 kilometers per hour in an RTI reply for 2021-22, and by 2023-24 it had slipped to 76, which means our fastest train averages slower than the traffic I sit in on my way to the airport.

Now hold that number against what the rest of Asia already does before breakfast. China operates about 48,000 kilometers of dedicated high speed track, the largest network on the planet, and its Fuxing trains cover the 1,318 kilometers between Beijing and Shanghai at 350 kilometers per hour in four hours and eighteen minutes, which is roughly Delhi to Mumbai before your chai goes cold. Japan opened the Tokaido Shinkansen in October 1964 and today it runs Tokyo to Osaka in two hours twenty two minutes with an average annual delay measured in seconds, about half a minute across the whole year, which is less delay than I experience walking from my bed to my desk on a work from home morning.

We are being lapped by our own neighborhood, and the scoreboard is written in timetables.

Speed turns out to be an economic variable, because the relationship between how fast a country moves its people and how fast it grows is about as close to a law as social science gets. Japan bolted the Shinkansen onto its economy at the exact moment it was doubling household incomes, and China poured 48,000 kilometers of high speed rail into the ground while its GDP went from roughly the same size as ours in 1990 to nearly five times ours today, and the research keeps confirming the mechanism, with county level studies finding that HSR connections raise local output through market access, because when a supplier moves from nine hours away to ninety minutes, day trips replace overnight stays and factories can promise deliveries they could never promise before. A freight rake doing 25 kilometers per hour is a quiet tax on every transaction in this country, and we pay it in the price of everything, forever.

The roads tell the same joke with different props. Most of our proudest urban infrastructure, the sea links and the flyovers and the airport expressways, carries a maximum speed limit of 80 kilometers per hour, posted by traffic police departments from Mumbai to Bengaluru with cameras ready to fine anyone who forgets. Eighty kilometers per hour is fifty miles per hour, and in America fifty is the speed you crawl at on an access road while the actual freeway flows past you at seventy five, and Texas posts eighty five, which is 137 kilometers per hour, as the legal limit on a public toll road. So here we are, a nation that announces five trillion dollar dreams and a demographic dividend lasting decades, officially committed to racing the United States at exactly half its speed, and then we wonder why the gap refuses to close, because you cannot win a race you insist on running at half throttle, and every year we spend defending 80 is a year the other side adds a hundred.

Why do we write such rules for ourselves though, because a speed limit is supposed to describe what a road can safely carry, and ours describe roads that would shake apart above 80. The infrastructure underneath is so poor that driving anywhere makes your blood boil, potholes that appear like jump scares, speed breakers planted after blind corners by engineers who hate joy, flyovers that dump you into a wall of auto rickshaws with no merge lane, lane markings that faded away sometime last decade, and traffic that converts a three lane road into eight lanes of pure negotiation. The cap is honest in its own way, it is the state admitting it cannot build a road worth speeding on, and then fining you for noticing.

This is also why buying anything with horsepower in this country is an act of self delusion, because the showroom will happily sell you a car that does zero to hundred in seven seconds and the state will book you for using any of it, so you end up owning a machine capable of autobahn speeds serving a life sentence on a flyover doing fifty, all that engineering purchased and never touched, like buying a grand piano to hold groceries.

I keep coming back to what speed actually is, which is respect for other people’s time, and a country that caps its trains at 55 and its flyovers at 80 is telling everyone inside it that their hours are worth very little. We are a young country holding the world’s largest working age population and we move at the speed of a Sunday afternoon cycle ride, and none of that youth matters while the slowness holds, because the world will simply route around us the way water routes around a stone. I do not know what breaks this, maybe a generation that grows up riding the Mumbai Ahmedabad bullet train and finds 55 kilometers per hour personally insulting, and until then I will keep paying my superfast surcharge, small change at a time, for the privilege of arriving late.

Tell me the fastest you have ever legally moved in this country. I am @troysk704.