Elphinstone Station stampede: Piyush Goyal orders slew of initiatives to beef up commuters' safety

Mumbai: Hours after a stampede left 22 commuters dead and 39 others injured, railway minister Piyush Goyal on Friday ordered a slew of initiatives to beef up commuters’ safety and security on the Mumbai suburban network, officials said. Holding a series of meetings with high-ranking officials of Western Railway (WR) and Central Railway (CR), he ordered setting up of multi-disciplinary teams to visit and inspect all suburban stations and identify areas of concern. The teams would identify critical locations prone to similar situations and draw up suitable action plans to tackle them. [caption id=“attachment_3452728” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of Piyush Goyal. PTI
[/caption] Ongoing works on foot overbridges at various stations would be completed on a war-footing and additional FOBs would be immediately planned out at other stations where passenger traffic is high. Goyal also directed the railways to draw up plans for all suburban stations to upgrade their electronic surveillance by installing CCTVs in a time-bound manner. The WR and CR will be required to resolve within one week all their pending issues with other agencies concerned like the Maharashtra government, Brihan Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority, City and Industrial Development Corporation, etc. Goyal also said that any concessions required to accommodate space constraints at railway platforms would be sorted out immediately. There are around 135 stations on the entire suburban network, comprising WR, CR and the Harbour Line, spread across Mumbai, Thane, Palghar and Raigad districts, catering to over 8 million suburban commuters daily. The distances covered are upto 123 kilometre on the WR from its starting point, Churchgate and more than 70 kms on the CR in different directions from the starting point, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. The two networks share one common railway station, Dadar which is considered the busiest and most congested on the entire suburban network. The minister’s directions came in the wake of a stampede which killed 22 commuters, including eight women, at the WR’s Elphinstone Road station bridge connecting with Parel on the CR, around 10.20 am at the morning peak hour rush of office-bound commuters. Late this evening, the WR announced that then Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu had cleared the proposal to construct a new FOB costing Rs 6.75 crore, running parallel to the existing bridge which was the site of the tragedy on Friday and tender documents were readied this month. Earlier on Friday, Shiv Sena MP Rahul Shewale had said that he had demanded widening of the (existing) bridge in a letter to Prabhu in April 2015, but it was rejected citing paucity of funds and operational constraints.