Unsafe trains put our future at risk

Rail accidents can happen anywhere in the world. But it takes a rare kind of talent to reflexively see it as a puzzling “whodunit”, a possible murder mystery, when it is the nth such mishap in the country, when there have been umpteen reports about the urgent need for rail safety measures, and when wrenching images of death and devastation stare one in the face.

Hearing railway minister Mukul Roy’s statements over the past few days I wonder if Mr Roy is indeed a man with that rare talent.
A Chennai-bound train caught fire. More than 30 men, women and children were charred to death. Many more have been injured and are struggling for their lives. A nation is grieving. All facts about the chain of events that triggered the fire were not available at the time of writing. However, media reports suggest that officials from the fire department and the railways are already jousting verbally over the reasons behind the Monday fire. The fire department officials, who reportedly reached the spot first, say they did not find any trace of kerosene. The railway authorities, on the other hand, have been saying they found traces of kerosene, indicating sabotage.
The end result? We don’t know. But soon after the news broke about the devastating fire on the Tamil Nadu Express, Mr Roy was telling the media that he did not rule out the possibility of sabotage.
“I am not excluding anything. I got a call from the divisional railway manager that there was a report of a blast. I don’t want to dwell on it further since you will infer that I am trying to divert the cause of the mishap to another direction,” said Mr Roy even before he had left for the accident site. Since then his constant refrain has been: “Nothing is being ruled out and nothing can be said without an investigation...”
The railway minister has done what most Indian railway ministers typically do in the event of a rail disaster. He has expressed deep grief, he has ordered an inquiry into the mishap, he has announced compensation for the families of the dead and the injured and he has asked the railway administration to provide medical care to the injured, at no cost to the latter.
All this needs to be done. But what about prevention? What about plugging safety lapses so that we don’t go down the casualty-compensation route again and again? Not just talk but, actually implement measures that make a difference on the ground. Here, the road ahead remains foggy.
Mr Roy’s predecessor, Dinesh Trivedi, lost his job trying to push through rail safety measures and modernisation.
When Mr Trivedi was the railway minister, a committee headed by Dr Anil Kakodkar, former Atomic Energy Commission chairman, submitted a report that listed urgently needed measures to modernise Indian Railways and improve rail safety. The committee pointed out that the line capacity has been severely constrained due to more and more trains over the years, that no technical aid was available on Indian Railways to run trains during foggy weather in winter, that little time was allocated for infrastructure maintenance and that casualties among railways’ own workmen were on the rise. It also recommended immediate modernisation of the design of coaches. The report said there should be no new trains till such time there were fresh inputs into the infrastructure, a statutory railway safety authority, more meaningful regulatory inspections and so on. The whole thing would cost some `1 lakh crore over the next five years. Out of this, `5,000 crore would have had to be mopped up as safety cess from passengers.
What happened next? Mr Trivedi was out and the Kakodkar Committee Report joined the ranks of official reports gathering dust. When he became the new railway minister, Mr Roy jauntily announced that his priorities would be “safety, security and punctuality”.
How was that to happen? Mr Roy has been too busy to tell us.
But one thing we know — every time there is a rail accident, it is good to wonder aloud if there is a possibility of sabotage. Mr Roy’s mentor, Mamata Banerjee, did that when she was the railway minister.
Does that mean there are no attempts of sabotage? Of course not. But saboteurs, real or imagined, cannot be allowed to deflect attention from the crying need to plug safety lapses.
Mr Trivedi is scathing: “The railways is in a mess. It has been so not just in the last 10 years, or 15 years, but over the last 40 years. The traffic has increased, the pressure has increased, the railway system has collapsed. Unless and until you address safety, God forbid, this could be a regular feature,” he told CNN-IBN soon after the Tamil Nadu Express tragedy.
Mr Trivedi flags a key question. Who dies in rail accidents? “The Rajdhanis and Shatabdis are perhaps taken care of. But if you see and analyse who dies in most rail accidents, you will find it is always the poorest of the poor.”
The same is true of most crashes, collisions, near-misses and fires in this country. At the end, who are dead? Is it the kith and kin of those who have been expressing deep grief or announcing compensations? Perhaps it is no point just blaming just Mr Roy. Given the fractious nature of the coalition government at the helm of affairs in Delhi and the state of the railways, it is high time the ultimate helmsman, the Prime Minister, took personal interest.
Many of us see disasters like a Salman Khan movie — a series of high-impact images that thrill and chill alternately. But soon they are off the screen and out of our mind. Those of us who are not directly affected and whose near and dear ones did not die or were not maimed get back to our ordinary lives.
But this time around, if images like that of the charred body of the child found clinging to its dead mother in the ill-fated coach of the Tamil Nadu Express does not move us to collectively demand action, and settle for no less, there will be an encore, a re-run of the casualties-compensation story. That would prove that we don’t need saboteurs. We are quite good at sabotaging our own future.

The writer focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies.