Belligerati

« This is really cool | Main | Treating human waste »

February 26, 2009

Interesting fact of the day

Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China. (The third-largest employer is the British National Health Service.)

I'm sure this depends on how and who you count. The US military (including those in reserves) is 3,385,400 (plus hundreds of thousands more civilians in the DoD) people where as the NHS has 1.3 million workers. So it might not be third. Indian railways has 1,406,430 employees as of 2007, so that might not be second. Even if you only count full time US military staff, that is 1,444,553 people, still putting it ahead of the Indian Railways. Either way, it is interesting to note that of the 5 organizations commonly listed as the world's largest employers, two are armies, two are socialized public services (health care and railroads) and only one is a private business (Walmart). I recall similar lists when I was a kid, and AT&T before it was broken up would have been on this list, with about a million employees right before break-up. Of course, that might be considered just another government sponsored monopoly and not the private enterprise that Walmart more clearly is.

Posted by OneEyedMan at February 26, 2009 10:29 AM

Comments

Post a comment