Track changes: Accidents on rise as Railways grapples mounting pressure

It was the evening of June 2, a Friday. At the Bahanaga Bazar railway station in Odisha, two of its four tracks were occupied by stationary goods trains. At five minutes to six, the Coromandel Express, on its way from Shalimar in West Bengal to Chennai in Tamil Nadu, came rattling along. Travelling at 128 km an hour, it veered off track and crashed into the back of one of the two goods trains.

Since the goods train was loaded with iron ore, the Coromandel Express ended up bearing most of the impact. Twenty-one of its coaches swung away and hit the rear of the Howrah Superfast, which was coming from the opposite direction at 126 km an hour. The result was the worst train accident in India in two decades. It killed 300 people and injured another 1,200.
 

Barely had the dust settled down that came news of the derailment of Delhi-Kamakhya North East Express in Buxar on October 11 and a rear-end collision between two passenger trains in Andhra Pradesh two weeks later. The Odisha disaster was attributed to faulty wiring and signalling failure, the Buxar derailment to faulty rail, and the Andhra collision to signal overshooting.
 

In recent years, the railways has been able to curtail consequential accidents, defined as the ones that cause loss of life, several injuries, and loss of rail property and stoppage of rail traffic. However, the frequency of accidents that cause large-scale damage has increased.

In the first six months of this financial year, April to September, there have been 20 consequential accidents: Four collisions, 11 derailments, and five fires in trains. October brought more bad news in the shape of the two accidents — Buxar derailment and Vizianagaram collision — which caused more than a dozen deaths. There have also been incidents of fire in trains after September, such as the recent one in a Bihar-bound passenger train in Etawah, Uttar Pradesh, which injured eight people.
 

In the whole of 2022-23, there were 48 consequential accidents, which cost eight lives, numerous injuries, and damage to railway property. In the scale of damage caused, they were nowhere close to the ones this financial year, as a majority of these accidents involved goods trains.
 

Increasing pressure
 

As Covid-19 receded and railway passenger traffic rose, the year 2022-23 saw a 30 per cent rise in consequential accidents.

Still, the year saw only eight deaths, compared with 37 in 2018-19 and a combined 26 deaths in the three Covid years of 2019-20, 2020-21, and 17 in 2021-22.
 

In addition, the year 2023 saw fire incidents in Tiruchirapalli-Shri Ganganagar Humsafar SF Express, Lucknow-Rameshwaram Bharat Gaurav Train, Falaknuma Express and Lokmanya Tilak Express. There were also derailments of Nilgiri Mountain Railway, Vijayawada-Chennai Central Jan Shatabdi Express, and a Chennai Suburban local train.
 

Officials say there is increasing pressure within the national transporter’s ranks to cater to the ever-increasing demand of passenger and freight traffic, which have touched record highs. “This is a tough period for the railways. There are a lot of capacity expansion projects in the works to relieve some of the pressure, but their benefit to the railway system will be 

seen around or after 2024-25,” said a senior government official who declined to be named.
 

Capacity constraints and the pressure of punctuality has had a direct impact on maintenance blocks for the railways. 
 

A maintenance block is a period of no traffic over a limited section for repair works. Former senior railwaymen say the broken rails that caused the accident in Buxar in October could have been spotted and rectified with well-planned maintenance blocks.
 

The railway ministry plans maintenance blocks eight weeks in advance, according to senior officials. As of November 16, 

almost 3,000 kilometres of track renewals is complete, which is 66 per cent of its yearly target.
 

However, field officials say there are at times slips between cups and lips. In the first half of this financial year, equipment failure has been higher than in the same period last year. While track and locomotive failures have declined, wagon detachments and other issues have increased, as have signal and overhead equipment failures. Lalit Chandra Trivedi, former general manager of East Central Railway, says a number of factors have contributed to the rising accidents. These range from long working hours of the crew, lack of fixing accountability at an organisational level, and the slow pace of capacity expansion.
 

Armour of Kavach
 

Indian Railways has indigenously developed an automatic train protection system rechristened as “Kavach” (Train Collision Avoidance System) to prevent accidents due to human error resulting in signal passing and over-speeding. However, this is still in its early stages.
 

“The coverage of Kavach right now is 1 per cent of the rail network. There is a need to fix structural issues before relying on Kavach to prevent accidents,” says Trivedi.
 

According to the railway statistical report, India is among the countries with the fewest train accidents, at 0.03 per million train kilometre.
 

“Indian Railways can rightfully claim to have one of the best safety records globally, measured in terms of accidents per million passenger kilometres. All measures, including infusion of funds for safety works, are in place. ‘Zero accident’ undoubtedly remains the target for safety performance, inter alia envisaging a reduction in accidents on a year-on-year basis to be able to reach there.

Any increase whether in the category of consequential or indicative accidents requires a focussed attention on primarily two core areas: Accidents caused due to human errors and those due to asset failures,” said M Jamshed, former member-traffic at the railway board.
 

According to sources, the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) was introduced in 2017-18 for replacement, renewal, and upgrade of critical safety assets with a corpus of Rs 1 trillion for five years. From 2017-18 till 2021-22, a gross expenditure of Rs 1.08 trillion was incurred on RRSK works.
 

“It is also time to revisit the subject of having a railway safety regulatory body as most of the developed railways have, especially in view of private operators, dedicated freight corridors and high-speed railway corridors that the Indian Railways 

is adding to its network,” Jamshed said. 
 

He added that a strategy to ensure better safety of operations involves eliminating chances of human error that may lead to 

an accident by automation and use of artificial intelligence.