"This is a very serious incident. A probe has been ordered. Whoever is found guilty will be punished stringently," PM Narendra Modi stated.
Killer tracks: What ails Indian Railways?
About 280 lives have been lost to the latest killer railway mishap in Odisha. For those who lost near and dear ones and perhaps also for the ghosts of those who expiredin this train accident or numerous ones before that a mechanism created by the name and style of Special Railway Safety Fund (SRSF) with a fund of Rs 17,000
crore in 2001 has no meaning.
All these have come a cropper and perhaps a marathon exercise in futility.
There is a cliche to believe that India has one of the largest train networks in the world and therefore accidents may be common notwithstanding repeated claims on security and safety. In a general sense the number of accidents have dropped due to improvement in infrastructure in the last few years.
But the challenges remain as the Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express derailed at about 1900 hours local time with some of them ending up on the opposite track. Another train - the Howrah Superfast Express travelling from Yesvantpur to Howrah is also said to have 'hit' the overturned carriages. A goods train also hit in reportedly.
It is already being designated as the worst of mishaps on railway tracks in recent years.
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| PM reviewing Odisha rail mishap relief works |
The Chennai-bound Coromandel Express and the Howrah-bound SMVP-Howrah Superfast Express trains met with an accident on Friday evening as 21 coaches of the two trains derailed near Bahanaga Bazar railway station in Odisha's Balasore district.
Friday's accident brought back the horrific memories of another deadly train accident in UP's Firozabad in 1995, in which 358 people died.
In a similar accident on August 2, 1999, the Brahmaputra Mail collided with the Awadh-Assam Express near Gaisal in Assam, which claimed the lives of approximately 290 people.
Decades back on June 6, 1981 around 800 people were killed in a train accident which took place when the locomotive fell into the river Bagmati in Bihar while crossing the bridge.
One can also mention August 20th, 1995 when the Purushottam Express collided with the stationary Kalindi Express near Firozabad leading to the death of over 300 passengers.Ten years later on Oct 29, 2005, the mishap in Andhra Pradesh claimed 113 lives.
Now comes the real post-mortem and it should be more than the mere blame game. After a major crash at Khanna in Punjab that claimed 200 people a detailed study by a review panel headed by a retired Supreme Court judge H L Khanna had observed that most of the rail accidents in India were caused by the poor state of the bridges and the absence of track maintenance.
But for many years the Railways did not implement the findings of the panel. The Khannacommittee had strongly recommended that the old bridges be abandoned or repaired.
Railways have 1,33,160 bridges, out of which 720 are important, 10,828 are major and 1,21,612 are minor bridges. In 2005 after the Andhra Pradesh mishap, it had come to light that there were 52,440 railway bridges which were more than 100 years old and another 90,000 more than 70 years old.
In 2018, the Modi government had informed Parliament that there were 37,000 railway bridges in India are 100 years old with almost 32 per cent of them being in the Northern Zone.
These have been some of the contributory factors for the rail accidents.
On September 9, 2002, there was a major derailment of New Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani Express near Bihar’s Rafiganj. The train derailed over a bridge on the Dhave river and 140 people lost their lives.
But in some of these cases the diagnosis and post mortem have been worse than the disease itself.After the 2002 mishap, Rabri Devi, then Bihar Chief Minister, wasted no time to target her political rival Nitish Kumar.
"A major portion of the bridge had caved in...but the then Minister of State for Railways Bandaru Dattratreya for his part had accused the Maoists of sabotage," says a former Railway official. Inquiries also revealed that the wooden sleepers as well as the iron suspension of the bridge was in a pitiable condition.
These should be taken as patterns and must be studied in detail to workout real time solutions.
In 2003, after a mishap of the Kacheguda-Bangalore Express train, K. Sivaprasada Rao, then Minister for Panchayat Raj in Andhra Pradesh, had said: "The Railways always try to pass the buck by dubbing every accident as an act of sabotage. They do not properly maintain the tracks despite growing speeds and increasing traffic".
This is also a case in point and not a general statement on the railway officials.
Last month Prime Minister Narendra Modi alleged that 'selfish and mean politics' had always overshadowed the modernisation of the Indian Railways in the past. But his government needs to do more thanit has been done so far to prevent accidents on rail tracks.
Experts have been stating for the last so many years that track circuiting is an important measure for ensuring railway safety. This aids 'detect' rail fractures and other hurdles. This requires funds and time. The renewal of tracks is a necessity after a stipulated time and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw have said earlier that a lot of work was being done on this. The Commissioner of Railway Safety has been called and an investigation will be held soon to try and identify the root cause of the latest Balasore accident in Odisha.
"Our prayers go out to the families and the souls of those who have died. Teams from the Railways, National Disaster Response Force, State Disaster Response Force and the state government have been engaged in rescue operations since last night," the minister said.
Asked about the opposition demanding his resignation, Vaishnaw said, "The focus right now should be on rescue and relief."
Frankly, the resignations of railway ministers do not help much except the media mileage if there is any. Human error is critical to most accidents. Some years back, Janardhan Marathe, former commissioner of Railway safety, had said in Pune that nearly 80 percent of accidents on tracks are due to human error.
He had also spoken about factors like engine driver jumping a wrong signal; or accidents can also happen due to wrong actions of the pointsmen or the station staff.
Railway infrastructures and maintenance require huge funds. A few years ago there was argument among members of a parliamentary panel that 'fare hike' should be linked to safety. But the politics of populism thrives. Fare hikes are always resisted. Even a minimum fare hike had resulted in the ouster of Dinesh Trivedi as the Railway Minister under Manmohan Singh government chiefly because his party Trinamool Congress and its supremo Mamata Banerjee believes in 'not hiking' the fares.
Often other factors -- which are not really considered - also work as key catalysts for accidents.In 2005,
the Secunderabad-bound Delta Fast passenger train derailed and seven coaches plunged off a bridge into a
rain swollen rivulet at Valugodu, about 80 km from Hyderabad.
There were breaches on tracks caused by the water pouring out of four overflowing reservoirs. There were
also blame games.
The state government had claimed that adequate information were provided to the railways regularly by the state Irrigation department.
Nevertheless before wrapping it up, it is worth sharing some bizarre statistics. Even a decade back,over 600 people die every year in India in train accidents and this outdid casualties caused by the guns of the terrorists.One is aware, such comparisons are odious but what it means is that the average Indian always puts his/her life and the lives of near and dear ones at peril whenever they travel in railways.
ends
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