Despite dramatic improvements train accidents happen. How can the situation improveIJ
In a reply in Parliament, the Ministry of Railways put out some impressive facts which said that the number of ‘consequential accidents’, where there were fatalities, came down from 195 in 2006-07 to 104 in 2016-17 and in the first three months of the current fiscal year, it came down to just 15. This number will clearly change after the incidents over the past week. First came the derailment of the Utkal Express and now a collision with a dumper truck that caused the Kaifiyat Express to derail. While it should be investigated whether the latter incident was an accident of a deliberate move, the first incident was indeed troubling and followed the incident near Jhansi on November 20 last year when 152 people died. While it is commendable that the number of train accidents have come down — in the 1960’s, there were over 13,000 train accidents — there were just 738 train accidents of all sorts in this decade till 2016. The same reply in Parliament said that the number of accidents per million train kilometers had reduced to 0.1 in 2016-17 from 0.23 in 2006-07 — there are still far too many people dying while riding Indian trains. This is a fluctuating number depending on the severity of the accident, but over the past five years, over 1,000 people have died in train accidents.
The Indian Railways carries a tremendous burden — there are over 13,000 long-distance (non-suburban) trains every day running on over 90,000 kilometers of running track. With such a load, it is inevitable that there will be some accidents. In fact, a large proportion of accidents are due to collisions when vehicles inadvertently or otherwise stray onto railway tracks. In a contest between a two-ton car and a hundred-tonne locomotive, there can only be one winner. It is unfair to blame the railways for these accidents, and over the past decade, there has been a concerted effort by the railways to construct flyovers over tracks. There are still cases, however, of equipment failure that caused accidents and in the most recent case, it appears that some unauthorised repairs were ongoing. These were all avoidable accidents and deaths. No mode of transport is completely safe, however, advancements in technology can dramatically improve safety as the aviation industry has proven. Further, there should be investments for better and improved technology so that human error among the lakhs of workers of the railways can be prevented as can mechanical faults. Faster rollout of additional track ought to help the Railways safety record further.
The attacks on this Government’s plans of building high speed rail by the Opposition are, however, unfair. Additional tracks laid out by the railways will dramatically reduce the load on existing tracks and any reduction of load will help in improving safety measures. It is commendable that the Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu offered to resign following the Kaifiyat Express derailment but that is not an answer. The Government has to develop innovative investment solutions to be able to pour in more money into the Indian Railways. A zero fatality goal by 2025 should be the target.