Shaktipunj Express derails: Third train accident in a month shows Indian Railways is rotting from within

Uttar Pradesh saw its third train accident in a month after seven coaches of the Howrah-Jabalpur Shaktipunj Express derailed near Fafrakund railway station in Sonbhadra, 80 kilometres from Varanasi.

Luckily no one was injured. The train was running at a low speed.

News of train accidents are hitting the headlines with every increasing frequency, it seems.

In August, the Delhi-bound  Kaifiyat Express derailed near Auraiya district in Uttar Pradesh.

Seventy-four people were injured but no deaths were reported. The train travelling from Azamgarh to Delhi collided with a sand dumper around 2.50 am between Pata and Achalda railway stations. NCR sources said that work for a dedicated freight corridor was in progress at the site at the time of the accident.

Only a few days before that, 14 coaches of the high-speed Utkal Express jumped the rails , with one of them crashing into a house adjacent to the track near Khatauli in Uttar Pradesh. 24 people were killed and many others injured. The impact of the accident was so severe that one of the coaches could be seen mounted on another.

And while then railway minister Suresh Prabhu offered to take ‘moral responsibility and  offered to resign , his tenure was marred with accidents.

According to a report in  India Today , since Prabhu took over as railway minister in November 2014, there were 347 accidents. That works out to nearly 116 accidents per year.

The train accidents in his tenure was perhaps part of the reason he was shifted to the commerce ministry .

But with Thursday’s accident, it seems Prabhu’s successor Piyush Goyal is off to a shaky start.

Unmanned level crossings and staffing issues

A major reason for accidents is unmanned level crossings.

Firstpost  earlier reported that almost every fifth train accident in the last two years occurred because of unmanned level crossings. Between April 2015 and March 2017, 98 people lost their lives at such crossings due to train accidents.

According to information provided in Rajya Sabha in August by Minister of State for Railways, Rajen Gohain, there are 7,701 such crossings across the country. Gujarat tops the list with 1,895 unmanned level crossings (across broad and narrow gauge operations of the Railways), followed by Uttar Pradesh with 1,112 such crossings.

To deal with the unmanned level crossings, the railways has a plan to eliminate those across broad gauge operations (4,943) by 2020,  but given its past record, things are lagging behind.

In its 12th report, submitted in December 2016, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways noted that with the exception of 2014-15 and 2015-16, the actual physical achievements for the elimination of unmanned level crossings have fallen way below targets.

There is also the problem of too many trains on the tracks.

Populist measures such as increasing the number of trains by subsequent governments have also  put an immense burden on railway tracks, creating further danger.

Staffing issues might also be affecting rail safety. According to a highly placed source at the Railway Board, more than three dozen stores officers were promoted as additional divisional railway managers during the tenure of former chairman AK Mittal, who stepped down after the Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express mishap.

“As stores officers don’t have the requisite experience and lack domain knowledge, promoting them as additional DRMs didn’t serve the purpose. Safety lies in the field and many of these officers, who never worked on the field, failed to have control over the operations… As a result, in the last one year we have witnessed several derailments,” the source told Firstpost on the condition of anonymity.

Poor infrastructure and resources

According to experts, poor infrastructure and a lack of resources also play a part.

The Kakodkar Committee, a high-level safety review committee constituted in September 2011 observed: “Inadequate performance due to poor infrastructure and resources. The financial state of Indian Railways is at the brink of collapse unless some concrete measures are taken and all safety margins have been squeezed. This has led to a neglect of infrastructure maintenance.”

Finally, a  2015 White Paper , commissioned by Prabhu shortly after he became railway minister, pointed out that 40 percent of the 1,219 sections are running at 100 percent or above ’line capacity’. The White Paper also pointed out that in the last 64 years, while the freight loading has grown by 1,344 percent and passenger kilometres by 1,642 percent, route kilometres have struggled to keep up, growing by only 23 percent.

According to this Firstpost report, the railways is still struggling for funds and straining to look beyond extra-budgetary resources nearly two years after that White Paper was tabled.

The Centre has allotted the railways Rs 1 lakh crore for safety measures, including upgrading and maintaining of tracks, but unless more emphasis is laid on the non-sexy areas of governance such as fixing accountability, filling up vacant posts and rooting out corruption, the spending of money won’t translate to tangible improvement in railways’ health, according to the report.