Asia Times: Indian Railways: another disaster waiting to happen



	August 07, 1999	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Indian Railways: another disaster waiting to happen
By Ranjit Dev Raj

NEW DELHI - A day before Monday's railway tragedy in West Bengal, police in that Indian state announced the discovery of an ingenious racket moving high value contraband electronic goods concealed in the panelling of coaches.

While the racket showed the faith smugglers place in the efficiency of the Indian Railways, it also exposed the rot that is setting into a transport system which cheaply moves 13 million people across a 110,000 kilometer network of tracks daily.

The quick reaction of the main opposition Congress party to Monday's accident, which claimed 300 lives, was that too much money was being spent on faster trains and too little on safety. ''Money that should be going into safety is being spent on faster trains and on broadening tracks, resulting in more accidents and casualties,'' said Congress spokesman Ajit Jogi.

It is small comfort to survivors that Railway Minister Nitish Kumar has announced his resignation to take responsibility for the crash. Many feel it is a political move made with an eye on the general election in September and October.

The job of the railway minister has always been a coveted one mainly because it is an opportunity to dish out patronage in the shape of anything from free passes to jobs, railway stations, an extra express train service and even entire railway lines. There is also money to be made in the award of contracts for construction, licenses for food stands and kiosks, concessions to industries, and purchase of all of kinds of costly equipment starting with locomotives.

In such a whirl, safety concerns are bound to get low priority despite the public criticism and inquiries which have followed crash after horrendous crash with almost monotonous regularity.

Ironically, the head-on crash at Gaisal after one train was switched on to the wrong track in the grossest kind of negligence came in a year Kumar had grandiosely declared the ''Year of the Passenger''.

When Kumar presented his $2.4 billion railway budget for the year in May, many pointed out that the allocation for safety was inadequate in view of a spate of spectacular accidents in recent times. Over the last five years there have been 15 major train accidents with death tolls ranging from 20 to 340 for a crash in 1995 when two passenger trains collided near Ferozabad about 200 kilometers east of Delhi.

Kumar earmarked most of the money for safety (about $375 million) for track renewal, prompted by an accident near Khanna station in Punjab state last November which killed some 200 passengers after their train flew off fractured tracks.

Kumar had then dismissed the tragedy as a ''freak accident - the kind which happens once in a blue moon.'' But that blue moon reappeared just eight months later in July this year when track fractures near the town of Mathura in northern Uttar Pradesh resulted in a goods train slalomming into a passenger express, killing 14 people. Nothing apparently was learned from the Khanna crash despite a telling inquiry report which revealed absence of basic safety equipment, poor track maintenance and sub-standard steel from state-run mills.

But tracks are only one area of concern. There are signalling systems to consider and above all the kind of personnel recruited to staff the gargantuan system. On Wednesday, The Hindu newspaper published a series of comments by senior officials on the appallingly unsafe railways.

''During most enquiries, it is shocking to come across staff manning safety positions unable to read rules and manuals . . . there is urgent need to review and upgrade minimum educational qualification,'' was one comment. ''Ours is one of the few countries in the world where almost semi-literate persons are allowed to drive diesel or electric locomotives of even express trains,'' was another.

Railway officials told The Hindu that drivers should have at least finished high school and that railway ministers should stop looking for administrative solutions to such basic human problems. Statistics show that while the frequency of accidents has dropped from two for every million train kilometers to 0.7 over the past decade, the percentage of accidents due to staff failure has remained static for the same period.

Then there are the multiple technologies in use. It was only recently that the last steam engine was taken off the tracks, while track and signalling systems are yet to keep up with 6,000 horsepower Swedish locomotives imported amid controversy five years ago. These locomotives, bought at $6 million a piece with assistance from the Asian Development Bank, were bought against the advice of the railways' own research engineers, and attracted censure from the Comptroller Auditor General (CAG).

The CAG has also expressed displeasure at the introduction since 1988 of a number of highly unprofitable fast, air-conditioned, limited-stop luxury trains by politicians wishing to please their constituencies. But the displeasure of the CAG is ignored with the same nonchalance as are the reports of the various inquiries that follow each crash and there is little change in recruitment in the railways, India's largest single employer.

The Indian Railways already runs 13,000 trains every day, more than in any other country, with a variety of slow goods trains, passengers, shuttles and high-speed express and luxury trains sharing the same tracks, officials point out.

As tracks and signalling systems groan under the load of more and faster trains, catastrophes like the one that happened at Khanna in November and at Gaisal on Monday are inevitable, they say.

(Inter Press Service)

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