June 2, 2024 – Odisha train tragedy : The tragic incident occurred when the Coromandel Express collided with a stationary freight train at Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore district. This collision resulted in the derailment of some coaches, which then collided with the Yeshwantpur-Howrah Express. The accident claimed the lives of 293 people and injured over 1,200 others.
June 17, 2024 – West Bengal train mishap: The accident occurred at Ruidhasa near Rangapani station in the Katihar Railway Division, ahead of New Jalpaiguri Junction. The mishap, in which nine passengers were killed, occurred within the Siliguri subdivision of Darjeeling district.
July 18, 2024 – Chandigarh train tragedy: At least four people were killed and 20 others injured after multiple coaches of the Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express derailed near Gonda in Uttar Pradesh.
July 30, 2024 – Jharkhand train accident: Two people were killed and 20 injured when 18 coaches of the Mumbai-Howrah Mail derailed in Jharkhand’s Seraikela-Kharsawan district. The incident happened at 3:45am near Badabamboo, about 80 km from Jamshedpur, under the Chakradharpur Division of South East Railway.
In a span of two months, four major rail accidents have raised the red flag on the safe train travel. These fatal accidents along with recent derailments of both passenger and goods trains have brought the focus back on safety issues. According to the reports, about 1.5 lakh positions responsible for “safety” are lying vacant in the Railways, the government said in an RTI response earlier this year. In total, the Railways empanelled 3,02,550 candidates in five years till 2023. It has released 9,97,638 vacancies during this period.
दो महीने में 11 रेल हादसे हुए हैं, जिसमें 21 लोगों की मौत हो गई
लेकिन…
मोदी के रेल मंत्री इसे ‘छोटी’ घटना बताते हैं, उन्हें शर्म आनी चाहिए pic.twitter.com/jhgX0TfH0X
— Congress (@INCIndia) August 1, 2024
Interestingly, this year’s Railway budget has allocated Rs 416.83 crore for “training and human resource development”, marking a 58 per cent rise from the 2023-24 budget (Rs 242.12 crore). The government started rolling out the Kavach system in 2020, nearly 8 years after its announcement. Kavach has been deployed on slightly over two per cent of India’s rail network. Thus, over 97% of the railway network lacks an anti-collision system, raising alarm about the validity of the “Kavach” system. A written response by the ministry on July 24 stated that Rs 1,216.77 crore had been spent on Kavach till now. As per the government, Kavach has been deployed on 1,465 km in the South Central Railway (close to 2 per cent) of the total 68,426 km network and on 144 of 15,200 loco engines across 7,349 railway stations.
In Parliament, we are seeing a new tradition. BJP Ministers don’t take moral responsibility of their failure but instead accuse history. Train accidents have been on the rise. The present Railway Minister is in fact the derailment minister, and therefore should resign… pic.twitter.com/44sv5OhvUc
— Gaurav Gogoi (@GauravGogoiAsm) August 1, 2024
Questions are already being raised about the speed of implementation of the anti-collision safety mechanism and the allocation of funds by the government. According to the railway expert and former General Manager of Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Sudhanshu Mani said, “At the rate they (government) are going, it’ll take forever. Kavach is a comprehensive signalling system which also has an anti-collision device. The government decided about three years back that they will not go for an imported system to upgrade our signalling system and Kavach will be adopted, which means that the government has confidence in its reliability and efficacy.” “One would expect the roll-out would be much faster because you have to cover 69,000 route km of the country. Depending upon whether it’s a double track or single track, it costs around Rs 50–60 lakh per km,” he said. If “Kavach” installation has to be completed within 10 years, the pace needs to be increased to 6,800 route km/year for the tracks and 1,500 locomotives per year, with a budget estimate of Rs 4,500 crore.
With the series of accidents happening and government’s silence over the issue, opposition parties launched a scathing attack on the BJP-led central government following the latest train accidents. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav hit out at the government’s track record when it comes to rail safety, stating, “This government wants to make a record in train accidents. They had record number of paper leaks, and now railway accidents. This government only makes big claims. People are losing their lives. The government should do something about it so that such accidents do not happen in future.”
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, while offering condolences to the victims’ families, asked the government to fix accountability following a spate of railway accidents and take measures to prevent such incidents. Banerjee, a former Railways Minister, tweeted, “I seriously ask: is this governance? This series of nightmares almost every week, this unending procession of deaths and injuries on railway tracks: for how long shall we tolerate this? Will there be no end to the callousness of Government of India?!”
Shiv Sena (UBT) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi questioned the government’s response to increasingly frequent instances of rail-related mishaps, accusing it of “shameful apathy”. “With several deaths and no accountability till date, I guess this also won’t have any impact. Announce compensation, promise enquiry and move on to another PR Instagram reel,” Chaturvedi said. She further attacked Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, calling him a “Reel minister,” and criticised overcrowding in trains, stating, “People are travelling in toilets but the government is not ashamed.”
One passenger dead. With several deaths and no accountability till date, I guess this also won’t have any impact. Announce compensation, promise enquiry and move on to another PR Instagram reel.
Shameful apathy. https://t.co/E3rzEs4FCf— Priyanka Chaturvedi🇮🇳 (@priyankac19) July 30, 2024
Though the government and the Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw claim in the decrease number of train accidents, the latest mishaps have a different story to tell. With increased budget allocation and authenticity in the installation of the ‘Kavach’ system on the largest Rail network in the world, it seems railways have to work on war-footing with a set time-frame.
