Derailed by ambition

When train inaugurations become a circus, railway safety becomes the casualty

As the nation mourns the Odisha train tragedy, it’s important to seek accountability for this man-made disaster and demand remedial steps to prevent the recurrence of such disasters in the future. The dead can’t come back, but we must ensure that the cause of their untimely deaths is examined scrupulously and that the responsible public officials, however high and mighty, are brought to account.

The accident has both proximate and structural causes. While the proximate causes include signalling failure, communication failure, maintenance lapses, and overworked staff, it is crucial to also examine the structural causes to prevent future accidents. Here are a four structural causes revealed in this accident for which the Modi government must answer:

The railway minister’s lack of attention to safety issues

What is shocking about the accident is that it was waiting to happen. The railway minister was aware of the failure of the signalling system but didn’t act upon it. On February 9, the chief operating manager, one of the top officials of the South Western Railway Zone, warned about the failure of the signalling system. He also warned that if the signal maintenance system was not monitored and corrected immediately, it could lead to “re-occurrences and serious accidents”. The railway minister ignored a warning as serious as this one from his top official and instead focused on the inauguration of Vande Bharat trains, and incidentally, even on the day of the accident, he was preoccupied with the Mumbai-Goa Vande Bharat launch.

As has been reported in the media, at a brainstorming session headed by the minister on Friday, just hours before the accident, presentations by various zones on railway safety were skipped. “Only one zone was allowed to make the presentation on safety, while the discussion on the launch of Vande Bharat trains was allowed,” as per the report.

This reveals the PM’s Vande Bharat propaganda isn’t just a harmless waste of public funds. When a prime minister goes around inaugurating trains, the whole railway top brass is disoriented. It spends precious time and energy that should be focused on safety and other pressing issues on attending to the PM’s publicity needs, thus putting the lives of millions at risk.

Failure to fill 1.42 lakh critical safety-related posts

This indifference to the lives of people because of an obsession with publicity reflects elsewhere too. Under the Modi government, the railways had an abysmal record of filling vacancies, thus also worsening the unemployment crisis in the country. The government has even failed to fill critical safety-related posts, leaving 1.42 lakh posts vacant. This results in overworked, overstretched, and strained operational staff like station managers, guards, and drivers, putting communication and operations at risk of failure like the Balasore accident. If sleep-deprived, overworked staff are forced to handle critical jobs for long hours without the prescribed break and without any back-up manpower, then is the government not precipitating the “signalling failure” and communication gap that caused this tragedy?

Diversion of safety funds and investments for attention-grabbing stunts: why is Kavach not installed and why is track maintenance ignored?

While the Railway Minister claimed that accidents would be minimised with the Kavach system, it is installed on less than 3% of tracks. The government’s failure to allocate sufficient funds for life-saving devices raises questions about its priorities. Also, the CAG 2022 audit revealed that railway track maintenance was being neglected, leading to derailments and accidents.

An elitist degradation of the general or sleeper class

The accident highlights how this government has robbed India’s aam aadmi of train travel. Many videos of the overcrowded sleeper class of the Coromandel Express just days before the accidents have surfaced. People were forced to travel like cattle. This degradation of train travel experience for India’s poor is not just limited to the Coromandel Express but is more widely spread as the Modi government has reduced the number of sleeper/general coaches from 10–12 per train earlier to six now and replaced them by the revenue-generating AC coaches. This has reduced the opportunities for transport and mobility for India’s poor and working class merely to raise more revenue for railways.

The accident reveals the sad reality of the Modi government turning the railway from an organisation catering to the travel needs of millions of the deprived into an elitist, profit-obsessed propaganda machinery with little regard to the safety of the average passenger.

If the PM is serious about taking the strictest action against the guilty, he must begin with the railway minister, who endangered the passengers by not taking timely action on the signalling failure, ignoring railway safety and giving it low priority, precipitating the communication breakdown by keeping lakhs of safety-related posts vacant, and failing to install Kavach on all routes despite knowing its potential to save lives.

The government must install Kavach on all its tracks in mission mode by the end of its term, even if it requires halting PM Modi’s Vande Bharat inauguration spree. It should restore the number of sleeper/general coaches to the earlier 12 in each train.

The PM must stop wasting the time of top railway officials by inaugurating every Vande Bharat train and allow them to focus on safety issues. Track renewal must be taken up as a priority, along with a white paper to fill up the vacant safety posts. Finally, a bipartisan inquiry committee must go
into the deep malaise that has gripped our railways.

(The writer is an AAP MLA from Timarpur and the party’s Chief Whip in the Delhi Assembly.)