Track restoration work at the accident site. Photo credit South-Central Railways
By Our Special Correspondent
New Delhi, October 30: Another mishap involving collision of two trains has exposed the safety claim of the Ministry of Railways. While the Railway Board officials have sought to express exasperation by blaming the loco pilots, the retired officials have called for the “heads to roll at the highest level amid spate of train accidents”.
The head on collision between two trains left 14 passengers dead and over 50 injured in the major accident in Andhra Pradesh. The Railway Board unofficially circulated claims that the loco pilot had missed the signals to stop to hit a stationary train. Both the loco pilot and his assistant died in the mishap.
However, the former top official of the Railways are not impressed by the explanations being dished out by the Ministry as two accidents preceded the Andhra Pradesh accident. The Balasore and Buxar rail mishaps had already cast shadows over the safety claims of the Railways.
“In my opinion, mandatory field inspections at various levels are not being conducted by the inspectors and officers of various departments. These should be monitored by the DRMs (Divisional Railway Managers) and GMs (General Managers) and defaulting officials should be identified and taken up administratively. Secondly, the persons identified during the CRS enquiry for their lapses should be severely punished as per D&A rules. Lastly, heads should roll down at higher levels so that administration feels the heat,” wrote Shiv Kumar, former GM, on Linkedin.
His views were endorsed by former Member of the Railway Board MK Gupta, who argued that “Kawach and all other big talk of technology is to divert attentions in an attempt to get away with criminal negligence”. “It is true that technology will reduce human intervention but for many years (say 10 years min) to come, India is not likely to reach that stage,” Gupta stated, while suggesting that the claims of Kawach against train collision is illusionary. .
Mentioning train mishaps during 2016-17 when “after spate of accidents then Minister and CRB were asked to go”, Gupta stated: “Reverting to the basics helped in improving the safety records to great extent and as a result, till end of 2022 there was no major accident. Again somehow rot set in and ‘chalta hai’ attitude got an upper hand.”
Gupta stressed in his comment to the remarks of Kumar that “what we need is competent DRMs and GMs who understand train safety and operations (and not keyboard and armchair Managers) and can implement the ground working rules else soon things will go out of hand”.
Lalit Mohan Chaturvedi, former GM in the Railways, also hit out at the “Ostrich type attitude”. “Something appears to have seriously gone wrong. Otherwise it is difficult to understand the spate of major accidents one after the other in different parts of Rail network. Root cause needs to be identified,” underlined Chaturvedi, who also added that “perhaps non-induction of expert engineers after switching over to IRMS mode is to blame”.
He also stated that “we cannot depend on Kavach where progress in spite of all the noise made is around one per cent of the total network”. “There is a need to replace video conferences by intensive field inspection. Crew runs, hours, facilities in the crew lobbies, running rooms, crew medical examinations procedures need to be revisited,” added Chaturvedi. He also called for a “third party safety audit of the Railways’ safety apparatus and its recommendations acted upon”.
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