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  • Deadly Indian rail crash shifts focus from new trains to safety

    Deadly Indian rail crash shifts focus from new trains to safety

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    • India’s train network seeing rapid expansion, modernisation
    • Experts say focus on safety has not kept pace with expansion
    • Government says data shows no major accident for years

    NEW DELHI, June 3 (Reuters) – India’s vast rail network is undergoing a $30 billion transformation with gleaming new trains and modern stations but Friday’s deadly train accident shows more attention should be paid to safety, industry analysts said.

    At least 288 people were killed in the country’s worst rail accident in over two decades after a passenger train went off the tracks and hit another in the eastern state of Odisha.

    State monopoly Indian Railways runs the fourth largest train network in the world. It transports 13 million people every day and moved nearly 1.5 billion tonnes of freight in 2022.

    Long considered the lifeline of the world’s most populous country, the 170-year-old system has seen rapid expansion and modernisation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push to boost infrastructure and connectivity in the fast-growing economy.

    This year, the government made a record 2.4-trillion-rupee ($30 billion) capital outlay for the railways, a 50% increase over the previous fiscal year, to upgrade tracks, ease congestion and add new trains.

    A new, semi-high-speed train built in India and called the “Vande Bharat Express”, or “Salute to India Express”, is showcased as evidence of this modernisation, with Modi himself flagging off the first journeys of many of the trains around the country.

    But Friday’s crash has come as a jolt to this makeover, experts said.

    “The safety record has been improving over the years but there is more work to do,” said Prakash Kumar Sen, head of the department of mechanical engineering at Kirodimal Institute of Technology in central India and lead author of a 2020 study on “Causes of Rail Derailment in India and Corrective Measures”.

    “Human error or poor track maintenance are generally to blame in such crashes,” Sen said.

    The railways have been introducing more and more trains to cope with soaring demand but the workforce to maintain them has not kept pace, he said.

    Workers are not trained adequately or their workload is too high, and they don’t get enough rest, Sen said.

    The east coast route on which Friday’s crash occurred, is one of the country’s oldest and busiest, as it also carries much of India’s coal and oil freight, he said.

    “These tracks are very old … the load on them is very high, if maintenance is not good, failures will happen,” Sen said.

    ‘GOOD SAFETY RECORD’

    Indian Railways maintains that safety has always been a key focus, and points to its low accident rate over the years.

    “This question (on safety) is arising because there has been one incident now. But if you see the data, you will see that there have been no major accidents for years,” a railways ministry spokesperson said.

    The number of accidents per million train kilometres, a gauge of safety, had fallen to 0.03 in fiscal 2021-22 from 0.10 in 2013-14, the spokesperson said.

    A 1-trillion-rupee, five-year safety fund created in 2017-18 has been extended for another five years from 2022-23, with a further 450 billion rupees of funding, after the first plan led to an “overall improvement in safety indicators”, he added.

    “Some malfunction has happened and that the inquiry will reveal,” he said, referring to Friday’s crash. “We will find out why it happened and how it happened.”

    Srinand Jha, an independent transport expert and author at the International Railway Journal, said the railways have been working on safety mechanisms such as anti-collision devices and emergency warning systems but have been slow to install them across the network.

    “They will always tell you that accidents are at a very manageable level because they talk about them in terms of percentages,” Jha said, adding that in recent years the focus has been more on new trains and modern stations and not as much on tracks, signalling systems and asset management.

    “This accident brings out the need to focus more on these aspects,” he said.

    Reporting by YP Rajesh
    Editing by Mark Potter

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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  • India’s worst train crash in decades kills at least 288

    India’s worst train crash in decades kills at least 288

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    BAHANAGA, India, June 3 (Reuters) – At least 288 people have died in India’s worst rail crash in over two decades, officials said on Saturday, after a passenger train went off the tracks and hit another one in an accident a preliminary report blamed on signal failure.

    One train in Friday’s accident also hit a freight train parked nearby in the district of Balasore in Odisha state in the east of the country, leaving a tangled mess of smashed rail cars and injuring 803.

    The death toll has reached 288, said K. S. Anand, chief public relations officer of the South Eastern Railway.

    Dead bodies are still trapped in the mangled coaches and the rescue operation is continuing, a Reuters witness said, while the death toll is expected to rise.

    A preliminary report indicates that the accident was the result of signal failure, Anand said.

    “The Coromandel Express was supposed to travel on the main line, but a signal was given for the loop line instead, and the train rammed into a goods train already parked over there. Its coaches then fell onto the tracks on either side, also derailing the Howrah Superfast Express,” he said.

    Surviving passenger Anubha Das said he would never forget the scene. “Families crushed away, limbless bodies and a bloodbath on the tracks,” he said.

    Video footage showed derailed train coaches and damaged tracks, with rescue teams searching the mangled carriages to pull the survivors out and rush them to hospital.

    Dead bodies were lying on the bloodstained floor of a school used as a makeshift morgue, and police helped relatives identify the bodies, covered with white cloths and placed inside chained bags.

    Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived at the scene, talked to rescue workers and inspected the wreckage. He also met the survivors at hospitals.

    “(I) took stock of the situation at the site of the tragedy in Odisha. Words can’t capture my deep sorrow. We stand committed to providing all possible assistance to those affected,” Modi said.

    A witness involved in rescue operations said the screams and cries of the injured and the relatives of those killed were chilling. “It was horrific and heart-wrenching,” he said.

    Families of the dead will receive 1 million rupees ($12,000), while the seriously injured will get 200,000 rupees, with 50,000 rupees for minor injuries, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Some state governments have also announced compensation.

    [1/20] Rescue workers search for survivors at the site of a train collision after the accident in Balasore district in the eastern state of Odisha, India, June 3, 2023. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

    “It’s a big, tragic accident,” Vaishnaw told reporters after inspecting the accident site. “Our complete focus is on the rescue and relief operation, and we are trying to ensure that those injured get the best possible treatment.”

    At least 261 people died in an accident involving two long-distance passenger trains in eastern Indian state of Odisha on June 2.

    DISMEMBERED BODIES

    “I was asleep,” an unidentified male survivor told NDTV news. “I was woken up by the noise of the train derailing. Suddenly I saw 10-15 people dead. I managed to come out of the coach, and then I saw a lot of dismembered bodies.”

    Video footage from Friday showed rescuers climbing on one of the mangled trains to find survivors, while passengers called for help and sobbed next to the wreckage.

    “We rescued at least 30 people, and some of them managed to survive, but three or four of them died,” said Sanjeev Rout, an electrician. A few metres away, rescue workers tried to cut their way into a damaged red-coloured coach.

    The collision occurred at around 7 p.m. (1330 GMT) on Friday when the Howrah Superfast Express from Bengaluru to Howrah in West Bengal collided with the Coromandel Express from Kolkata to Chennai.

    Indian Railways says it transports more than 13 million people every day. But the state-run monopoly has had a patchy safety record because of ageing infrastructure.

    Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik described the crash as “extremely tragic”.

    Opposition Congress party leader Jairam Ramesh said the accident reinforced why safety should always be the foremost priority of the rail network.

    Modi’s administration has launched high-speed trains as part of plans to modernise the network, but critics say it has not focused enough on safety and upgrading ageing infrastructure.

    Experts said Friday’s train accident came as a blow to Modi’s makeover plans for railways.

    India’s deadliest railway accident was in 1981 when a train plunged off a bridge into a river in Bihar state, killing an estimated 800 people.

    Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed condolences over the accident.

    ($1 = 82.40 rupees)

    Additional reporting by Akriti Sharma, Subrata Nag Choudhury, Mayank Bhardwaj, Sakshi Dayal, Anirudh Saligrama, Baranjot Kaur, Nandini S, Adnan Abidi and Sunil Kataria; Editing by Edwina Gibbs, William Mallard, Mark Potter and Giles Elgood

    Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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