“If you are travelling safely by trains today, it is because our blood and sweat are burning as fuel,” said Pawan, a goods train loco pilot with the Indian Railways, sitting in the courtyard of his home on the morning of July 17. “Even then, it is difficult to be safe, and I would advise the Indian public not to take train journeys.”
The previous day, Pawan had worked a shift of almost 13 hours, driving a train starting from 5.15 am. The day before that, too, he had worked a shift of around 14 hours, beginning at 8 am.
He had travelled to and from two stations in Jharkhand about 120 km apart. The journey should have only taken around three hours each way, but it took him 12 hours on the first day and 14 hours on the second, owing to delays along the way.
This was a violation of rules formulated under the Railways Act, 1989. These rules state that the total duration of a loco pilot’s shift should not be more than 11 hours. Further, the “running duty”, or the duration for which a loco pilot drives a train at a stretch, should not exceed nine hours.
“There is nothing astonishing about the fact that I worked for 14 hours,” said Pawan. “This is normal for us – we work for 10, 12, 14 hours quite regularly.”
Like all the loco pilots Scroll spoke to, he asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he was not authorised to speak to the media.
The working conditions of loco pilots had been in the news in the preceding weeks, following an accident on June 17, in which a goods train rammed into the Kanchenjunga Express in West Bengal’s Jalpaiguri, leaving 10 people dead and 40 injured. At first, the Railway Board blamed the accident on the deceased loco pilot of the goods train, stating that he had gone over the speed limit and violated stop signals.
Railway unions contested this claim, and argued that authorities should wait for formal investigations to be completed. They also emphasised that loco pilots worked under immense stress. When the official report came out, it cleared the loco pilot of blame, and noted that the primary reasons for the accident were procedural lapses and erroneous manual signalling.
Even so, the Indian Railway Loco Runningmen Organisation highlighted the fact that the deceased loco pilot had worked four night shifts in a row and had been reluctant to undertake the journey, but had been forced to do so by railway management.
This kind of workload is not an exception. As Scroll found over conversations with 12 loco pilots, some of whom had been working for over two decades, work conditions in the profession had always been taxing, but the situation had deteriorated in the past ten years, particularly after the Covid pandemic. Excessively long work hours in overheated cabins with inadequate meal breaks and rest time was taking a toll on their health, they said. Since most trains lack toilets for the crew, they said they were even cutting down on drinking water.
Scroll emailed queries about the working conditions of loco pilots to the railway ministry. This story will be updated if we receive a response.
Even though they were forbidden from speaking to the press, a group of loco pilots in the pilots’ lobby at a station in Jharkhand opened up about their troubles with this reporter. “We are tired and can’t take this anymore,”’ one said. “So we will talk to you, but please maintain our anonymity.”
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Pawan also introduced me to his neighbour Chandan, a fellow loco pilot, who emerged from his house next door. “Last weekend I returned home after being on duty for some 30 hours,” said Chandan.
Chandan had begun his shift at 4.35 on Saturday morning. But he was made to wait for four hours before he could start driving the train.
After he had been in the train for 11 hours, he was told to stop the train mid-journey and was relieved of his duty at 7.40 pm.
“I could have made that journey in 2 hours, but I would drive for five minutes and then be made to wait for hours,” said Chandan. He blamed the slow progress of the train on bad management.
Chandan couldn’t return home, since the station was fairly remote, and there was no readily available road transport. At 9.05 pm, he boarded a goods train, but that train was made to stop at around 4 am, and the pilot of that train was relieved of his duty at around 7 am. Finally, at around 10 am, the two boarded a passenger train and Chandan reached home at 12.20 pm.
Chandan’s long journey home was in clear violation of the Railway Board’s own recommendation that even when a loco pilot is required to work past the 11-hour limit, for instance to reach a point where a change in pilots has been arranged, the maximum amount of time he should be made to work is 12 hours.
“The accidents that you see in the news, they are all happening because of how stressed we are at work,” said Pawan.
In the past two years there have been at least three train accidents, or derailments, in Madhya Pradesh ,West Bengal and Punjab, which were caused by overworked loco pilots skipping stop signals or going into microsleep at the wheel.
Loco pilots who drive goods trains suffer the most from extended work hours, since the timeliness of goods trains has a lower priority than that of passenger trains, as well as mail trains.
“Conditions are bad for loco pilots throughout the country,” KC James, the general secretary of the All India Loco Running Staff Association, told Scroll over the phone. He added that “Some zones have it slightly better, while others have it worse.”
Those who worked for the East Coast Railway and South East Central zones struggle particularly hard, he said, because these were busy mining areas, and thus had high freight loads. On June 2 last year, the East Coast zone witnessed the deadliest train accident in India in recent years in Balasore, in which almost 300 people died, and more than 1,000 were injured.
Apart from extended work hours, another factor that greatly contributes to the exhaustion of loco pilots is having to work multiple night shifts. “Often, I’m home for only two nights a week,” Pawan said. “I hardly spend time with my family.”
This is despite a 2013 high powered committee report recommendation that night shifts be limited to only two continuous shifts in a row, with a provision of a 24-hour rest period before a third night shift. This recommendation had been implemented for a while for all railway workers, the loco pilots at the station said. But about two years ago it had been changed, and under current rules, loco pilots are regularly assigned up to four night shifts in a row.
Research has warned of the risks of such practices. Citing a 1980 study conducted by the Research Design and Standards Organisation of the railways, the high-powered committee report noted that even a second consecutive night of work was found to “dampen the mental alertness, making Drivers vulnerable to operational lapses”.
Another study, on “sleepiness at work in train drivers and railway traffic controllers” by Brain Work Laboratories, Finland, noted, “The resilience in a human being for undertaking work at night and sleeping during day can work for certain period only, and in case the human being has to undergo long spells of continuous night duty, there is a strong probability of fatigue intervening in course of performance of his duty.”
The high-powered committee report also analysed “signal passing at danger” cases, which refer to instances when a train passes a stop signal. The committee found that over 50% of such cases occurred at night. Around half of those cases occurred between 2 am and 6 am. Referring to three specific cases it examined, the committee noted, the loco pilots “had been working during night over extended hours of continuous wakefulness for prolonged periods” which “expectedly resulted in poor judgement, poor decision making, loss of their alertness and vigilance and related psycho-motor coordination”.
Loco pilots’ said their exhaustion is exacerbated by the condition of running rooms, where they are supposed to rest when on outstation duty. “Often there’s no electricity, no water, no AC in these far off running rooms,” Ravi said. “Only the good running rooms are highlighted in the media, but there are plenty of bad ones.”
Loco pilots also explained that rules for their hours of rest were flawed, and often violated anyway.
For instance, they noted, a loco pilot was entitled to 16 hours of “headquarters rest” whenever they reached their headquarters after an outstation shift. But if they took a break on a journey during an outstation shift, they were only entitled to eight hours of rest. This rule completely omitted to take into account how many hours an individual had worked before the point of rest, they argued.
“If I work for 14 hours and I reach headquarters, then I get 16 hours of rest, but if I am headed outstation and work for 14 hours, then I only get eight hours of rest,” said Ravi, a loco pilot. “After that, they expect me to work for 14 hours again! Shouldn’t they assess how long I’ve worked for previously and see how tired I must be?”
Further, loco pilots pointed out that rest hours were often disrupted. For outstation shifts, they said, they were usually woken up after six hours. “Ideally, we should not be disturbed for eight hours completely, because in that much time we have to bathe, eat and sleep,” said Ravi.
Loco pilots are also entitled to “periodic rest” every month at their headquarters, akin to the weekly leave that workers in other occupations take. This entails four periods of 30 hours of rest, or five periods of 22 hours of rest, allocated in consultation with the administration.
But often, the 30 hours are grouped together with a spell of 16 hours of headquarters rest that they are entitled to, loco pilots explained. In such a situation, they do not receive the entire 30 hours they are entitled to.
The government has issued confusing statements on this matter. On July 26, for instance, in a written reply to a question asked in the Rajya Sabha about rest periods granted to loco pilots, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the minister of railways, indicated that since periodic rest was always taken at loco pilots’ headquarters, any time they availed of it, they were also availing of headquarters’ rest.
But this statement is in contravention of a judgement by the Central Administrative Tribunal’s Bengaluru bench. James shared court documents from 2010, when the Indian Railway Loco Runningmen Organisation had challenged the railways’ intermixing of different rest periods with the regional labour commission and the tribunal. The tribunal agreed with an earlier order of the commission and reinforced it, stating that the two different types of rest were distinct. It ordered that if headquarters rest overlapped with periodic rest, then for the overlapping period, loco pilots were entitled to monetary compensation at twice the rate of their normal wages.
In any case, loco pilots find even the mandated 30 hours of periodic rest to be inadequate. “If I return from a night shift, then I sleep in the day to catch up with my sleep,” said one loco pilot at the Jharkhand station. “By the time I’m done, it’s evening and then the next day I have to report to work in six hours’ time.”
He added, “We have many responsibilities at home, we have to go to the market, or the bank, look after our kids, but there’s never enough time.”
Pawan’s wife said that she had to manage far more than her share of household responsibilities because her husband’s schedule was so packed and erratic. “We don’t get to take him along to our hometown in Bihar so I’ve started going on my own with the kids,” she said.
Pawan added, “I don’t get to go to any parent-teacher meetings at my kids’ schools, and I rarely get to meet my extended family for festivals and functions.” Compounding these stresses is the fact that while loco pilots are entitled to 60 total leaves in a year, most only end up getting between 15 and 20 days off. “They don’t give leaves for festivals or family functions,” Ravi said. “At the most, they allow one day of leave.”
If loco pilots take any leave without official permission, even with the most pressing justifications, they are marked absent and often face disciplinary action. “I know a loco pilot who took leave for his own wedding, and he got chargesheeted!” said Nikhil, referring to a step of disciplinary action.
Chandan recalled another loco pilot who had applied several times for leave to attend to his elderly father, who needed a surgery. After he was repeatedly denied leave, he was forced to remain absent from work to care for his father. “Even if a family member falls sick, supposing my child had the flu, even for that the authorities require a medical certificate,” Chandan said.
After the Kanchenjunga Express accident, in response to criticisms that loco pilots were overworked, the railways formed yet another committee to examine whether the recommendations of the previous committee in matters such as working and rest hours were being followed.
Even as loco pilots struggle to perform their duties with inadequate rest, the government has sought to increase its surveillance of them.
Over the past decade, loco pilots explained, the railways has been installing voice and video recording systems in the crew compartments of trains. “There’s so much surveillance that even if the train has been stopped for a while, we can’t close our eyes for a quick wink. Because if they catch us, they will fine us,” said Vijay.
Chandan noted, “We spend more than 12 hours in the compartment and we have no privacy for ourselves.”
After an October 2023 accident in Vizianagaram district, Andhra Pradesh, in which 14 died and around 50 were injured, Vaishnaw told the press, “Now we are installing systems which can detect any such distraction and make sure that the pilots and the assistant pilots are fully focussed on running the train.”
Alongside video surveillance, loco pilots said that there also was increased monitoring over their activities and any sort of dissent they might participate in. “The previous protests we held, just for informing the media about it, they withdrew three sets of railway passes from me,” said Vijay. A railway pass allows a loco pilot to travel at a subsidised rate.
They also noted that rule 14 (ii) of the Railway Servants (Discipline and Appeal) Rules, 1968, allows authorities to punish and even sack a railway staff member without holding an enquiry. The rule was rarely used earlier, but this had changed in recent years, they explained. This was apparent after July 5, when the leader of the opposition and member of parliament Rahul Gandhi met loco pilots in New Delhi. “After we met Rahul Gandhi, we have heard that authorities are vying to reprimand the ones who met him,” said Ravi.
Loco pilots believe that the money spent on surveilling them could be better used. “Instead of providing us with toilets and air-conditioning, they have spent money on cameras so fine that they can even capture the grey strands of hair on our head,” said Chandan.
The complaint about a lack of toilets was a widespread one among loco pilots. “When Nitish Kumar was the railway minister in the late 1990s, they had inaugurated toilets in the crew compartment, but those were put only in a few trains,” said Vijay.
One of the recommendations of the 2013 high powered committee was the “provision of a suitable waterless-type urinal on every locomotive as an immediate measure”. But a decade later, this is still to be implemented.
In May 2024, the Ministry of Labour formed another high powered committee to “provide defined time intervals for food and attending calls of the nature while on duty for the Loco Running Staff of the Indian Railway”. It is undertaking this measure to ensure that India’s practices are in line with the International Labour Organisation’s Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919. India ratified the agreement in 1921.
Loco pilots said that if they wanted to use the washroom at a particular station, they had to inform the station manager at least one station in advance. Even so, they would be allowed to use the toilet only if there was enough time available, while their assistant remained in the cabin. If there was insufficient time, they would have to wait till they reached another station.
On long distance routes it isn’t always possible to find washrooms – Vijay cited the example of Duronto trains, some of which have six-hour stretches without stops. He explained that drivers sometimes have to “carry polythene bags and urinate in those at the back of their cabin and throw it away when it’s convenient”.
Nikhil, a loco pilot who drives the new Vande Bharat trains, noted that there was considerable discussion about the fact that these new trains had toilets for them. But, he explained, “Those toilets are behind the pantry compartment. If a passenger has entered that toilet, then we have to wait for them to get out. The timetables for these trains are very tight and we don’t really get adequate time to attend to nature’s call.”
Many pilots avoid drinking water for long stretches of time so that they won’t have to use the toilet. This in turn causes health issues. “When people make an animal work for two-three hours, they give it water after that,” Vijay said. “Aren’t loco pilots human beings?”
Women loco pilots have an even more difficult time, particularly when they are menstruating or pregnant. “Men can still go for nature’s call out in the public, but women need privacy to relieve themselves, which they don’t get,” said Priya, a loco pilot. “I only take small sips of water when I’m at work. This has taken a toll on my health.”
Other aspects of loco pilots’ working conditions are also neglected, resulting in significant risks to their health. For instance, no clear plan has been drawn up to allow them to eat their meals comfortably.
In 2010, the Railway Board received a right-to-information request seeking details about the time allotted and arrangements made for loco pilots to eat their food. The board had a pithy response: “No such instructions stand issued from Board.”
Meanwhile, the loco pilots said, all other staff in the railways have at least an hour set aside in their shifts to eat meals.
Goods train pilots find it easier to eat, because their trains are often left standing for long stretches of time. However, for passenger trains, rules are strict. One loco pilot explained that if they were “caught eating on camera” in their cabins, the administration usually initiated disciplinary action against them.
Nikhil explained that he often worked five-hour shifts on a Vande Bharat train, which leaves in the evening and reaches its destination around midnight. “These are hours within which people would eat their dinner,” he said. “But I only eat dinner after reaching because if I’m caught eating on camera, I can be fined for it.”
Vijay noted, “Going for such long periods without food is bound to cause gastric issues for anyone.” He said he knew of loco pilots “who have been fined for drinking tea during their work”.
When I visited Pawan at his home, he offered me some biscuits. I asked him to eat some too, but he refused with a smile, “I have to be very careful about what I eat,” he said. “My body is under such stress after working long hours, I can’t eat too much sugar or outside food.”
Loco pilots also have to endure intense heat in their cabins. “We’ve been hearing for ten years that our compartments will have ACs installed in them, but the process was very slow,” said Vijay “It’s only after Rahul Gandhi met the media that there has been a surge in the installation of ACs in trains.”
The 2013 high powered committee described the working conditions inside cabins as “fatigue inducing”. It stated, “The temperatures inside the cabin go as high as 60 degree centigrade in peak summers and close to 4-degree 5-degree centigrade in peak winters with wind entering through the crevices in the doors/windows.”
Loco pilots are also exposed to high levels of noise. The high powered committee report noted that according to the United States’ Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations, an individual exposed to 90 decibels of noise for more than eight hours a day faces a risk of hearing loss. Noise levels inside cabins, it observed, are dangerously close to this limit, rising as high as 88.4 decibels.
Given their poor working conditions, loco pilots said, it was ironic that they had to undergo a fitness test every few years – the frequency of these tests increases with their age. “We are expected to maintain A1 fitness to carry out our duties,” said Vijay. “But what kind of atmosphere are we given?” He added, “When we first join the railway workforce, we are all fit and healthy. But within a decade of duty, loco pilots start having all sorts of health issues – blood pressure, sugar, cardiac issues, memory loss, back pain.”
Underlying all these problems, Vijay noted was the fact the government “isn’t recruiting enough loco pilots”.
In January 2024, the Indian Railways announced 5,969 vacancies for assistant loco pilots. In response, job aspirants led fiery protests in Bihar, West Bengal and Rajasthan, demanding more vacancies. On June 18, a day after the Kanchenjunga Express crash, the railways increased the number of vacancies to 18,799. But loco pilots surmised that given the extensive training involved, it will take around two years to fill all these vacancies.
“In that time, 15 to 20,000 of our colleagues will retire and they will also increase the number of new trains,” said Ravi. “So the work pressure will only increase for us.”
