Balasore train collision is a fallout of the low priority given to railway safety by the government
May 23, 2023: “The all-around work to transform the railways began only after 2014. Everyone was clueless before this. So how could they even think about high-speed trains?” — The Prime Minister of India.
June 3, 2023: 288 families grieve the loss of their loved ones. 1,000 families traumatised.
Telangana, 2014, 20 dead. Rae Bareli, 2015, 32 dead. Kanpur, 2016, 150 dead. Andhra Pradesh, 2017, 40 people dead. In an answer given to Parliament in July 2022, the Ministry of Railways stated that there were a total of 244 “consequential” train accidents between 2017 and 2022.
Balasore was an accident waiting to happen.
The self-indulgent photo-ops for Vande Bharat train inaugurations have not aged well. Sadly, India’s passenger trains are still neglected and remain mobile mortuaries. On the floor of Parliament, members from Opposition parties have often red-flagged these serious issues and offered constructive suggestions. No one listened, because PR (public relations) was being prioritised over PS (passenger safety).
Let’s begin by sharing a paragraph written in this column that was published last fortnight, days before the tragic accident. “In 2017, another precedent was set aside by the BJP. For the first time, the Railway Budget was subsumed into the Union Budget. This had never happened before. The (separate) Railway Budget on the floor of Parliament has now been consigned to the dustbin” (‘A house of dubious firsts’, IE, May 26). Red flag.
Infra at the cost of safety and maintenance: Here is what I said in the Rajya Sabha last year: “Your outlook is different from the outlook of the Opposition and many other parties. For us, the Railways constitute the infrastructure for the fundamental right of every Indian citizen to move from point A to point B. It is the fundamental right for transport. You may look at it differently. That bullet train is your vanity project.” Red flag.
No one is opposed to the idea of the bullet train. But what is of concern is the Union government’s list of priorities. The cost of one bullet train from Mumbai to Ahmedabad is over Rs one lakh crore. Compare this to the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh, a fund created specifically for critical safety-related works in the Railways. The five-year budget for this fund is Rs one lakh crore! Red flag.
Some more. When railway sets were imported from Europe, was proper sequencing done? Was safety blindsided by reckless infrastructure push? Was maintenance jeopardised because it was a service dog, not a show dog? A scathing report by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) opined that non-priority projects got precedence over maintaining safety standards. Over 50 per cent of the compulsory track safety inspections were not done. Three out of four consequential accidents in the last four years were due to derailment. The Ministry admitted in Parliament that over three lakh positions in the Railways (gazetted and non-gazetted) are still vacant. Red flag.
Slow roll-out of anti-collision device: In 2022, the Ministry of Railways told the Rajya Sabha that “Safety is accorded the highest priority. Indian Railways has indigenously developed an automatic train protection system rechristened as ‘Kavach’ (Train Collision Avoidance System), to prevent accidents due to human error resulting in signal passing at danger and over-speeding”. (The Ministry used the term “rechristened”! Basically admitting that they had pinched an idea from 2009 and were only packaging it differently.) Of the total railway route of over one lakh kilometres across the country, Kavach has been installed on only 1,445 kilometres so far.
Let me give you another example. The South-Eastern Railway division, the route where the Balasore tragedy took place, has not spent a rupee on anti-collision devices in the last three years, even though an amount of Rs 943 crore was sanctioned.
On February 15, Indian Railways tweeted that, “Indian Railways production units have ramped up LHB (Linke Hofmann Busch) coach production by manufacturing 4,175 LHB coaches in FY 2022–2023, till 31 January”. LHB coaches were deemed to be safer with anti-collision technology, disc-brakes, and centre buffer coupling system (absorbing high impacts and preventing flipping of coaches post impact). Both the express trains involved in the tragedy were equipped with LHBs.
Ignored Vision Document 2020: In 2009, the then Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee, had tabled the Vision 2020 document in Parliament. Let me quote from Section 6.2 of the document “Safety: Zero tolerance for accidents. In 10 years, Indian Railways would target to banish accidents from its operations. This would be achieved through a combination of technological and HR interventions. Advanced signalling technology (such as automatic verification of train movement and line occupation through track circuiting/axle counters, train protection systems and anti-collision devices) would be used in combination with training of station and running staff to eliminate collisions”. Little done this past decade. Some grim questions to answer.
P.S. Since 1940, senior government inspectors of Railways have been placed under the administrative control of “some authority of the Government of India other than the Railway Board.” Guess who the Commission of Railway Safety will submit the report of the Balasore accident to? The Ministry of Civil Aviation.
[This article appeared in The Indian Express | Friday, June 9, 2023]