Throughout the 1860s and 1870s railways found it impossible to compete not only with bullock carts

The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India by Jon Wilson. Technology and transportation are critical to progress but have evolved on independent paths in different places at different times. An insight:

…the most important technological change for the transportation of heavy goods in nineteenth-century India was not the arrival of the quick, expensive railway: it was the move from pack animals to carts pulled by two or four beasts in the first half of the century. This was the process historian Amalendu Guha calls ‘the bullock cart revolution’. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s railways found it impossible to compete not only with bullock carts, but also with human-powered river transport. Rowing boats along the Ganges and Jamuna won a price war with the railways over the cost of transporting heavy goods. Vessels powered by human beings were able to undercut steam vessels elsewhere.