Every time a bus collides with a heavy truck or an oil tanker overturns and claims lives on a national highway, the party actually responsible is not the driver behind the wheel. It is the logistics model the state has followed for decades. Pakistan has a long history of policy failures. Prioritizing road transport over railways for freight is one of them. Despite inheriting one of the largest railway networks in South Asia at independence, the country has never used rail's true potential for transporting goods. Instead, the governments kept funding that choice long after it has proven deadly, wasteful, and strategically foolish.
This is not a complicated policy question. Freight belongs on rail, not aboard an 18-wheeler driven by an underpaid, overworked driver on a road never built for that kind of load. Rail is safer. It is cheaper. It is faster over distance. And unlike a fleet of trucks scattered across every blockade-prone highway in the country, it is far harder to bring to a halt. Every year the Pakistani government chooses otherwise, it is choosing, in effect, to keep killing more citizens of this country on highways.
The government is choosing it in plain sight. In this year's federal budget, the National Highway Authority was given Rs224.51 billion. The Railways Division got Rs40.65 billion (barely a fifth as much). Of that shrinking railway allocation, only Rs25 billion has been set aside for the first phase of ML-1, the Karachi-Rohri section, financed largely through a roughly $2 billion Asian Development Bank loan rather than Pakistan's own resources. Even that money has moved at a crawl. Groundbreaking has been pushed from this July to early 2027, with officials more recently talking about a September 2026 start instead. A project whose full upgrade, from Karachi to Peshawar, is estimated to cost $6.66 billion. This is not an oversight. It is a budget that tells, in numbers, exactly which mode of transport this government has decided to bet the country's freight future on; and it is the wrong bet.
The relevant ministries deserve a real scrutiny here, not just polite disagreement. Freight rail modernization is central to CPEC 2.0. ML-1's apparent shift from the CPEC framework to Asian Development Bank financing is concerning. The reasons behind this transition remain unclear. As Pakistan's flagship rail project, ML-1 should have remained a national priority, with stronger domestic commitment to its financing, regardless of the funding source. Meanwhile India, our neighbor and rival in every economic sense that matters, is racing ahead with its own Dedicated Freight Corridors while our planners keep signing off on more highway lanes for trucks.
Pakistan’s freight policy has left its people living, and too often dying, under the trucks it chose over trains.
The cost of this failure is not abstract. A train can move a ton of freight roughly 250 miles on a gallon of fuel; a truck manages barely 90. One freight train replaces 72 trucks, 72 fewer chances for a tanker to overturn on the Superhighway, 72 fewer trucks pounding roads into rubble that taxpayers then pay to rebuild. The government itself has admitted that high freight costs helped drive this spring's inflation. Exporters, meanwhile, are quietly losing ground to regional competitors especially China which moved their freight onto rail years ago, while our factories still pay a road tax nobody voted for.
None of this is because rail cannot work here. It is because it has never been allowed to. Where freight rail has received even modest attention, freight revenue alone jumped 14pc, from 36 billion last year to 41 billion this year. Imagine what real investment, sustained over a decade, could do. Rail has its own maintenance backlog. Recent accidents like the Shalimar Express collision are proof of that. But that is an argument for funding it properly, not for continuing to starve it while pouring money into roads. Instead, the Ministry of Railways should establish a dedicated freight trains department. The department should operate full-time, staffed with internationally trained professionals and equipped with the digital systems for effective implementation.
This is not a call to abandon roads; they will always matter for last-mile delivery. It is a call to stop pretending that highways can carry a freight economy on their own, and to stop funding that pretense with public money while people die under trucks and tankers. Pakistan's leadership has the CPEC 2.0 corridors, the ports, and the Special Economic Zones to justify a real freight-rail initiative. What it has lacked is the political will to fund one.
The government will not be judged kindly for a Rs224 billion road budget sitting next to a Rs40 billion railway budget, not when the human and economic cost of that imbalance is so visible. It is time the state stopped choosing trucks by default and started choosing rail on purpose. Pakistan's freight policy has left its people living, and too often dying, under the trucks it chose over trains.