Indian Railways On Slippery Track !

BY R.K.MISRA

On September 30 last year, in the run-up to the Gujarat elections, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Vande Bharat express between Gandhinagar and Mumbai. Within a week the train showcased as a specimen of the changing face of new India met with an accident after a herd of buffaloes came onto the track. The front part of the train engine was damaged but there was no loss of life. Over a period of a month, the train saw  three accidents involving cattle and a fourth one in which a woman lost her life. On October 9, a total of 19 cattle had died on the spot  after being runover by an Ajmer-Mysore express train near Dungri railway station in Valsad district of Gujarat. Each one of these minor mishaps carried a warning which failed to serve as a wake-up call.

The trains in question may have got off comparatively lightly but the horrific three- train accident  in Balasore district of Odisha on June 2 that  has extracted a very high price in terms of  human casualties has once again brought into sharp focus a long lingering malaise in the prevailing system. The rush to glamourize travel through sleek, high-speed trains hardly serves the intended purpose in the absence of assured safe tracks to run them. 

While the exact cause of the pile-up will be known only after an inquiry is conducted , the growing human and cattle pressure on land and the consequent perilous state of movement in and around railway tracks is there for all of us to see. Cattle roam around these tracks without let or hindrance  and so do humans. The possibility of creating a  completely barricaded corridor for the movement of trains countrywide still remains a dream for sheer enormity of resources involved in the exercise though the government claims to have eliminated all  unmanned railway crossings.

Unlike the Narendra Modi government’s passion project, Bullet train between Ahmedabad and Mumbai  which  is coming up on a fully elevated corridor, most other trains including the Rajdhani  and the semi- high speed Vande Bharat  are all operating on the usual tracks and are thus accident prone, more so as the speed of the trains is sought to be  jacked up without corresponding increase in barricaded security leaving the possibility open for the recent Balasore like mishaps in future as well. A 16 coach Vande Bharat train costs Rs 115 crores and carries 1128 passengers while an 8 coach one costs around Rs 70 crores and carries 530 passengers. The bullet train project which was  sanctioned in December  2015 with a projected outlay of Rs 108,000 lakh crores and 80 per cent Japanese assistance is already expected to see costs scale-up to Rs 1.6 lakh crores by completion time, according to one estimate but what about the rest ? In between lies a yawning chasm in which the rest of India conducts its rail journeys.

India accounts for the fourth largest railway network with over 22593 operating trains(9141 freight and 13452 passenger)with a daily passenger count of 24 million and 203.88 million tonnes of freight. Railways claimed to have developed technology in signalling and telecommunications and a phased modernization programme was in place. However, spokesperson of the Indian railways  also admitted that the Kavach system  developed indigenously to prevent train accidents was not available on the route where the recent train accident occurred. The Indian Railways had made known its resolve to install train collision avoidance system over 37,300 high density route kms by 2025.The route in question is reported to be one of the heaviest density rail traffic routes but by its own admission remains bereft of this system.

 The Congress opposition has gone ballistic furnishing data in support of their assertion that  neglect of vital parameters has played no mean a role in the latest rail disaster. It’s spokesperson asserted that a serious collision had been averted in Mysuru  division on February 8 exposing serious flaws in the signalling system with clear warning of immediate corrective measures. He also deigned to add that the Parliamentary standing committee had slammed the Railway Board for disregard shown to the recommendations of the Commission for Rail Safety(CRS).The Parliamentary panel on railways had also expressed its concern on the fall of its net revenue which had recorded a loss of Rs 15,024.58 crore in Financial Year 2021-22.

 Railway insiders  aver that the present government is overly focused on launching new trains and overhauling railway stations which gets more attention rather  than overhauling track signalling systems and incorporating better asset management practices. A CAG report had also drawn attention to the consistent failure of the railways to meet its target of Rs 5000 crores annually from internal accruals towards the Rashtriya Rail Suraksha Kosh launched in 2017-18,atleast for the first four years. The Union government, in its budget exercise speaks of a massive track modernization programme underway while the Congress Opposition cites the CAG report to point to the shrinking track renewal allocation year on the year. Be that as it may but the travel lines between the sleek few and the soil-soaked many, is stark and wide ,more so  when  estimates of the number of poor in India vary  between 2.5 per cent of the population to 29.5 per cent based on different estimates between 2014 and 2022 !

(Published in editions dated June 6,2023)

http://epaper.lokmat.com/lokmattimes/main-editions/Nagpur%20Main/2023-06-06/6

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