India's Railways are Not Safe

On June 2nd, Friday, 6:55 p.m. India had the worst railway crash in 28 years.

275+ people passed away because of the crash and 900+ people were injured. This rail disaster took place in Balasore, Odisha.

What caused the crash?

There was a goods train parked on the Loop Line. The Loop Line is a train track on either side of the main train tracks where slower trains can park themselves in order for other, faster trains to cross. At the time there was a goods train parked in the loop line, waiting for the Coromandel Express to cross.

Instead of the Coromandel Express crossing, it was given a signal to enter the Loop Line where it crashed into the goods train. The crash happened when the Coromandel Express was at a high speed causing the front cabin to climb on top of the goods train and the impact spread across the train.

Due to this impact, the cabins of the train entered the other tracks. A train was crossing at the same time, The Yashwantpur Howrah Superfast Express which crashed into the cabins of the Coroomedel Express.

With multiple crashes and derailments (1,127 derailments between 2017-2021) taking place every year the question arises of why the Indian Government isn’t taking action.

The Indian government has tried to take action but due to the corruption in India, no growth has taken place in terms of the safety of trains. The Indian Government in 2017 (to 2022) dedicated 15,000 crores to railway safety and asked the Railway Association to contribute 5,000 crores. For the next three years, the Railway Association did not contribute their share. Moreover, out of the money in the fund, 2,300 crores was spent on non-railway safety measures.

The Kavach System is another security system, which has apparently been implemented by the Railway Ministry but did not help these 2 crashes at all. The Katvach system is Automatic Train Protection, it is meant to reduce collations by using Radio Frequency Collation and automatically applying the breaks. This Kavach system would bring down the train's speed to 30km/hr which then can be easily stopped manually.

The reality of this Kavach system is that ‘it is easier said than done’, the implementation of this Kavach system hasn't been worked upon, and only 2% of India’s trains have the Kavach system in place. Yet, another fault of the Railway Ministery.

The question being asked is if this was a human or technical error; some are even suspecting this to be sabotage.

Jaya Verma Sinha, a member of the Railway Department has said, “The system is 99.9% error-free. But 0.1% chances are always there for an error.” To a question whether the crash could be a case of sabotage, she said: “Nothing is ruled out.”

The Railway Minister has also claimed that ‘criminals’ have been identified.

The question I am asking is ‘Are we talking about sabotage to distract the public from the fact that there is a safety flaw in our Railway systems? This accident is due to the insignificance of safety and human life to the Railway Ministry and the government.’

Even if this train wreck is because of human error we cannot disregard the fact that trains in India are not safe. How many more lives have to be lost before action is taken?