Wages Of An Overburdened Railway Network

The death toll of 288 in the decade’s most ghastly rail crash near Balasore in Odisha has evoked ample scrutiny in the media and public domain. What however has escaped much notice is the fact that most of those dying in the smash of three trains on June 2 evening were travelling in the three bogeys just behind the engine of the Coromandel Express.

They were mainly nameless daily wage workers hailing from poor states like Bihar, Bengal and Assam holding tickets for unreserved coaches. They were those who had uprooted themselves from their soil to head for more industrialised southern states to eke out a measly livelihood of say Rs. 500 to 800 a day.

Many of the corpses being unrecognizable by their kin travelling from far off destinations, they are destined to remain unclaimed and uncompensated. Though the Railways has announced compensation for even the ticketless dead, the hassles will be formidable.

India could rightfully boast of having the third or fourth largest rail network in the world. Nearly 13,000 trains trundle on a track length of over 65,000 kms carrying over 15 million passengers every day. These are numbers that make us proud.

But the fact that it fails to ease the rigours of six out of seven of its users escapes the notice. Swarms of people who get in and get out at over 7,000 stations everyday, stand shoulder to shoulder over long stretches inside the steaming in[1]teriors of general category coaches, far removed from the air-conditioned cars placed at comfortable distance from the engines.

Standees and the ones hanging from knobs and chains outnumber those lucky ones who have a seat to squeeze themselves in and share with others. India’s railways are clearly overburdened. Consequently, victims of the inadequate infrastructure during such calamities are the poor who cannot/do not afford to shell out some extra money to allow themselves a category of the travellers who travel with their names recorded in the rail registers.

Given the statistics generated by the Indian Railways themselves, while the passenger load in the country has gone up more than threefold over the last 50 years, the railway’s capacity in terms of mileage of track has increased only about 40 per cent.

Trunk routes spread over 9,000 kms operate at 125 per cent capacity. Overused tracks barely allow sufficient gaps for maintenance and overstressed and overstretched personnel have least capacity to comply with the standard operating procedure (SOP).

It is these trunk routes that allow transfer of economic migrants across states of the union and contribute to leveling of inequalities and disparities between regions. Pivotal role of the Indian Railways in the nation’s economic life is widely acknowledged.

The network transports nearly eight billion passengers annually. This is roughly double of what China’s network does which at 155,000 km track length, is two and half times bigger but carries less than half of passengers carried by the trains in India.

Those with intimate knowledge about the Indian Railways are unanimous that dangerous level of congestion is the major impediment in ensuring the adequate level of safety and comfort to its users. If this much could be learnt from the June 2 carnage in Coromandel Express, the Odisha tragedy may well enable the Indian Railways to initiate a new chapter.