Safety first

Railways should stop looking for quick-fix solutions

On the face of it, the government has been swift in delivering “exemplary punishment” after the Kalinga Utkal Express ran off the tracks in Khatauli in Uttar Pradesh, killing 23 people. While some top officials have been “sent on leave” with immediate effect, some others have been suspended. The government has sought to send out a signal that responsibility will be fixed and no laxity will be allowed. This is in response to a preliminary probe that suggests that the train derailed because it was allowed to run on a section of track that was undergoing repair and maintenance work. The lapse lay in not blocking the traffic while the repairs were being conducted. Simply put, for far too long, the government of the day has tried to find a quick fix for dealing with the enormous increase in demand for railway services and associated safety requirements. Handling the twin demands of punctuality and carrying out repair works on tracks has led to a compromise that has resulted in a neglect of the minimum safety standards that need to be met.

The truth is that Indian Railways has an unenviable safety record. In the recent past, there have been many other serious accidents involving “derailment”. In November last year, 150 people died when 14 coaches of the Indore-Patna Express derailed. A month later, 15 coaches of the Sealdah-Ajmer Express went off the rails. Then in January this year, 39 people lost their lives when the Hirakhand Express derailed in Vizianagaram. The government has either treated these as episodes of “sabotage” or isolated episodes of mistakes at the level of local officials. But the fact is that the problem is systemic. As a report submitted by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on railway safety noted, 75 to 85 per cent of all railway accidents happen because of “derailment”. It is an open secret that there is an acute deficiency when it comes to maintenance and track renewal in Indian Railways. The report also offered a sense of the problem: “While the traffic of passengers and freight over the railway network has increased by 1,344 per cent and 1,642 per cent, respectively, over the last 64 years, the route kilometres have grown by only 23 per cent”.

For the most part, railway ministers were all too happy announcing new trains with little focus on either safety or sanitation or timeliness. The record of the current government, however, has been mixed. For one, it has not been as populist as its predecessors in starting new trains. Moreover, in the Budget for 2017-18, it announced the setting up of the Rashtriya Rail Sanranksha Kosh with a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore. This fund, a long-pending recommendation of the Anil Kakodkar-led high-level safety review committee, will be used to improve safety preparedness and maintenance practices. The bullet trains can wait; the best way to honour the memory of those who have died in such accidents will be to get the policy priorities right.