Prabhu calls emergency meeting of zonal GMs to discuss accidents

There have been as many as eight derailments in the past nine months

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu has called a special emergency meeting of the general managers (GMs) heading the Indian Railways’ 17 zones to deliberate on safety issues. The meeting comes after two train accidents last Saturday and eight derailments in 2015.

The meeting will be held in the form of a conference on Tuesday where the issue of safety will be discussed threadbare. “The minister and the full railway board will address the meeting. The minister has been emphasising on zero accident mission. The one-day meeting of the GMs will take an action plan and implementation strategy,” said a senior official.

Two British women had died and five passengers were injured when the Kalka-Shimla train derailed near Parwanoo in Himachal Pradesh on Saturday. In another accident the same day, two passengers died and eight others were injured after nine coaches of the Duronto Express going from Secunderabad to Mumbai derailed in Karnataka.

Earlier this month, 42 people were injured after six coaches of the Chennai-Mangalore Express derailed in Tiruchi near Poovanaur district in Tamil Nadu. While the incident did not account for any casualties, at least three people were seriously injured and train services to Chennai from south Tamil Nadu were disrupted for several hours.

The spate of derailments this month follows the ‘freak incident’ involving two trains at the same spot near Harda in Madhya Pradesh in August, leading to loss of 29 lives. Six coaches of Kamayani Express from Mumbai to Varanasi, and three coaches of Mumbai-Jabalpur Janata Express derailed within a gap of seven minutes around 30 km from Harda, as the base of the train tracks was washed away in flash floods.

So far in 2015, nearly 190 lives have been lost and hundreds injured in train accidents. The ministry is working on a ‘zero accidents mission’ to improve railway safety.