The Big Story: Railroading safety

The Indian Railways is a gargantuan operation. It runs 19,000 trains each day, transports 23 million people a day and with 1.3 million workers, is the eighth largest employer in the world.

While the railways showcase India’s good side, there’s also another aspect to the operation. The country’s trains are often late, dirty, congested and – most egregiously – have a terrible safety record. In 2014-’15, Indian Railways recorded 0.05 casualties per million passengers it carried. This was up from 0.02 the year before. The cumulative toll is staggering: 27, 581 Indians died in railway accidents in 2014. By comparison, in the United Kingdom, not a single passenger has died in a train accident in the past decade.

On Saturday, India saw its latest horrific train tragedy. Twenty two people died as the Puri-Haridwar-Kalinga Utkal Express got derailed in Uttar Pradesh. Preliminary reports seem to suggest that the accident was a result of a lack of coordination. Repairs of the track were being carried out but the track was not closed off to traffic – an error that lead to 22 deaths.

This abysmal safety record could be improved by better management and a bit more money. Much of the problem is caused by low maintenance and significant overuse. For example, as much as 40% of the Indian Railways’ lines are utilised beyond 100%. This fatigue means derailments are the most common sort of accident making up 46% of all accidents.

The next most common accident is people being hit at level crossings: this makes up 43% of all accidents. In 2012, the Kakodkar committee on railway safety had recommended doing away with level crossings altogether. This has obviously yet to be implemented.

But rather than work on these easily fixable basics, successive governments have dawdled, focusing more on public relations rather than ground work. For example, new train routes are often announced arbitrarily, responding to short-term political pulls, stressing an already congested network. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has committed a large corpus of funds to a bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. But the bullet train will service very few people (it will cost about the same as a flight) and it is unclear when the project will be finished. This money and effort might have been better utilised in making incremental improvements to rail safety, saving precious lives.

It’s time India paid more than lip service to protecting the lives of it citizens.

The Big Scroll

  1. The Indian Railways is crumbling under its own weight – and multiple ambitions, writes Mayank Jain.
  2. Even though Indian Railways has just plugged a loophole, train reservations have always been a joke, reports Mayank Jain.
  3. India’s rail safety rests on the shoulders of 200,000 trackmen with 15 kilos of gear on their backs

Subscribe to “The Daily Fix” by either downloading Scroll’s Android app or opting for it to be delivered to your mailbox. For the rest of the day’s headlines click here.

If you have any concerns about our coverage of particular issues, please write to the Readers’ Editor at readerseditor@scroll.in.

Punditry

  1. To annul the marriage between two consenting adults and force an adult woman to follow the dictates and religion of her father is deeply problematic, writes Manini Chaterjee in the Telegraph referring to the Kerala “love jihad” case.
  2. As the Doklam crisis continues to linger, Bhutan seems to be drifting away from India. In the capital Thimpu, young Bhutanese openly proclaiming their love for China and even monks and senior officials are not immune to China’s charm, writes Rabi Banerjee for the Week.
  3. Neoliberalism has become a rhetorical weapon, but it properly names the reigning ideology of our era – one that venerates the logic of the market and strips away the things that make us human, argues Stephen Metcalf in the Guardian.
  4. Why does Bangladesh not treat the British departure in 1947 as a part of its history, asks Mahmud Rahman in the Dhaka Tribune.

Giggle

Don’t Miss

Media reports have blamed the online challenge for prompting several youth to kill themselves. But the authorities are sceptical, reports Abhishek Dey.

“Why was his suicide linked to the Blue Whale Challenge then?

The day after Dey’s death, reporters thronged the locality and they went around posing questions to residents, even children who claimed to be friends with the victim, said one of the journalists who was there that day. ‘Some of the boys who were interviewed mentioned about Ankan playing video games and that led to the quick assumption that the death could have links with the Blue Whale Challenge,’ said the journalist, asking to remain unidentified. ‘By then, news about the challenge and mysterious suicides worldwide was already doing the rounds.’”