Heads rolled in the Indian Railways on Sunday within the deadline set by Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu earlier in the day for action against those directly or indirectly responsible for the tragic Kalinga Utkal Express accident in Muzaffarnagar. The Ministry suspended four junior rail personnel and sent three senior-level officers — Member Engineering AK Mittal, Northern Railway general manager RN Kulshrestha and Delhi Division DRM RN Singh -- on leave, as a disciplinary action pending a commission of enquiry. This apart, the chief track engineer of Northern Railway has been transferred.
The action against the seven railway staff came after Prabhu had directed his officials to “fix the responsibility by tonight”.
The theory that negligence by the railway personnel could be the main reason behind the accident got strengthened as the ADG law and Order of the Uttar Pradesh Police said that as per the probe by its Anti-Terrorism Squad “prima facie there was no evidence of any terror outfit involved in the accident”.
The Ministry too itself indicated at negligence saying a probe has been ordered to ascertain if any maintenance work was being done on the tracks without permission and without following the laid down rules. The probe is being conducted by the Commissioner, Railway Safety (CRS), Shailesh Kumar Pathak, who is looking into “every angle, be it sabotage, technical lapse or manual fault”.
The death toll in the accident, meanwhile, went up to 22, with one more person succumbing to his injuries in a hospital in Ghaziabad. As many as 15 bodies have been identified even as the number of those injured rose to 156. The damaged stretch of around 200 metres of the route is expected to be restored by Sunday night and the movement of some trains could resume.
Intriguingly, though, even after the lapse of 24 hours of the mishap, Railway Board Member Traffic Md Jamshed said, “It was not clear what kind of work was going on at the site.” “Any work on tracks has to follow a manual. We have maintenance manuals which lay down guidelines for work on any kind of railway infrastructure,” Jamshed said briefing the media about the Khatauli train mishap.
The CRS has invited people to be part of the enquiry into the derailment of the Utkal Express. People have also been asked to send information in writing to the commissioner’s office in Delhi.
Pathak will also scan a 15-minute audio clip containing a conversation between a rail staffer and a media person, in which the railway employee alleges that the track was broken and the work to repair it was not being done properly.
“We have got the clip from the media and heard it. In the clip it sounds like a conversation between a railway worker and a media person. In it, the worker is saying that the work was going on the track and it was being done negligently,” Jamshed said.
Jamshed, who visited the spot in Khatauli, said he had seen maintenance tools on the tracks.
“There is some audio clip of some conversation that we will probe. Also, when we did the site inspection, we saw some equipment the railways use for track repair present there.” he said adding the Railway Police has lodged an FIR related to the accident.
He said sometimes repair needs to be done on an emergency basis, but even then, if the next station is informed, the consequent trains are stopped.
“Then we get our supervisors on the track which is inspected and repaired after which the trains are allowed to run with a speed restriction. Red flags are also shown to trains in case there is a problem on the tracks,” he said.
He said it would be investigated if these protocols were followed this time. “Prima facie the information is that there is divisional responsibility involved if work was being done without seeking permission. By this evening we will know if any of our staff was responsible for this,” he said.
Over half of the nearly 600 train accidents in the last five years have been due to derailments with the Utkal Express being the latest. As per official figures, a total of 586 rail accidents happened in the last five years and 53 per cent of them were because of derailments. Since November 2014, there have been 20 rail accidents, including minor ones with the worst being on November 20, 2016 when the Indore-Patna Express derailed near Kanpur resulting in 150 deaths and over 150 injuries.