For speed and safety on the tracks, Indian Railways has problems to solve

Ten days after a multi-train crash killed 288 people in Odisha’s Balasore, the Indian Railways finds improving safety is crawling uphill. Repairing a line to make it fit for trains again is complicated enough but then it has to tackle the costs of a new network management system. Officers are reluctant to work in safety directorates for fear of "victimisation".

Responding to a growing economy, the Railways has ramped up freight and passenger traffic but its track length has expanded less than 4 per cent since 2013. Railway data shows that in the five years up to FY21, the average speed of freight trains has increased from 23.7 kmph to 41.2 kmph.

Speed vs safety

To move rakes and trains swiftly and safely is difficult. In a top-level meeting held just a month before the Bahagana Bazaar accident, Anil Kumar Lahoti, chairman of the Railway Board, pointed out that 48 “consequential” train accidents took place in FY23 compared to 35 in FY22. The Board has had to pull up all Railways zones for not holding mock drills for rescue work after an accident. (How many Railway zones are there?)

Repairs or maintenance of a railway line is unpleasant news to break to station controllers, who along with officials in divisions, guide thousands of rakes and trains every day. Repairs or maintenance upset the timetable of a stretched network.

In FY23, the Railways earned some Rs 2.2 trillion from the freight and passenger business but the amount is not enough for a significant upgrade of its engineering technology, including that for safety. Making the entire signaling electronic, as Centralized Traffic Control (CTC) does, is highly expensive. “Whether CTC is safer or a more efficient system is a hypothetical question because I don't think there is any talk of replacing the existing control system on trunk routes or any other routes of the old IR (Indian Railways) network. It will mean scrapping huge quantities of existing equipment. I don't think Railways can afford such expenditure,” said a former member of the Railways board.

The latest technology in engineering and safety is often imported. The Railways is fighting a Rs 443 crore suit by a China-based firm, Research & Design Institute Group, which claims its contract to install signaling and telecom systems on a 417-km stretch was wrongly terminated. The contract was among Indian government entities withdrew after the Galwan Valley clash between Indian and Chinese troops in 2020.

The Railways is now egging domestic companies to develop indigenous systems to replace imported ones. It takes about five years to put up a new signaling system on the entire route length of Railways. It is a problem seen elsewhere. In Ethiopia, interoperability of Chinese and European railway technology systems has proved difficult.

Beset by legacy problems, it is in greenfield projects like the Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) that the Railways is implementing (CTC). Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, in a reply to Parliament last year, said more than 3,000 km of DFC is being constructed for freight trains to run at 100 kmph.

Data released by the Press Information Bureau shows that until the end of FY23, 45 per cent of 6,342 stations on the Railway network had an electronic interlocking signaling facility. The Railways has upgraded 530 km of its network with electronic interlocking, compared to 218 km in 2021-22. “It is also the best figures achieved in automatic signaling in the history of Indian Railway,” the ministry has said.

To ensure rains fast and yet offer space on high-density routes, automatic block signaling has been introduced. Train movement in this system is controlled by the automatic stop signals operated by the passage of trains.

Tamper proof EI exists

To ensure that a line under repair comes back to life safely, Vaishnaw wants electronic systems to be tamper-proof.

“All signaling equipment are tamper proof up to a point, but provision has to be made for maintenance, repair and overhaul of the equipment. On these occasions, interlocking has to be necessarily suspended. Very detailed protocols are in place with plenty of checks and balances when any such activity is undertaken. Problems arise when the field staff indulges in shortcuts to minimise downtime. On most occasions they get away with it, but at times it can lead to disasters,” says a former officer of the Railways.

Officers in the safety directorates can stamp down on shortcuts. These officers guide counterparts handling operations about possible risks developing in a train network, but in the pecking order of posts in the Railways, operations or commercial positions rank way above those of safety.

Working in safety directorates carries the risk of being victimised. “On repatriation the safety personnel should normally not be posted to work under an official whose role in an accident was investigated by him\her…while working in the Safety Organisation,” said a memo issued by the Railway Board in early 2023.

“All safety personnel on reparation shall be entitled to represent (to their seniors), if they perceive any victimisation as a consequence of their working in the Safety department,” said the memo.