National

Blood On The Tracks

A less callous attitude to safety and maintenance could have saved about 200 lives

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Blood On The Tracks
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.ROBED in bloody woollens, they lay on rows of ice. The stench of death hung heavy over the slushy makeshift morgue at the Arya Samaj College in Khanna in Punjab's Ludhiana district. With strangers prodding and prying them to satisfy their curiosity and image-hungry photographers capturing their dead, bloated shapes. They had hoped for a happier destination. They had expected a safer journey. India's annual railway absurdities and accidents, however, claimed these unsuspecting, innocent lives—about 200 of them.

Yet another disaster on the tracks has transformed sleeping passengers into statistics. As the superfast Frontier Mail Golden Temple Express was zooming past the green farmlands of Kauri village near Khanna at three in the morning, a coupling gave way, derailing seven coaches which fell onto the adjacent track. Three minutes later, the Sealdah Express, which had picked up speed after pulling out from Ludhiana station—just 30 km from the accident site—rammed into the coaches. The impact was fatal.

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The media, which hurried to the site, was quick to dub it "Punjab's worst train disaster". Railway minister Nitish Kumar also made it to the spot on time and (no surprises here) ordered an inquiry into the mishap. As had been done earlier this August when 24 people had died at Parli Vaijanath when a goods train had rammed into the Manmad-Kachiguda Express. And the year before that in July, when 12 had been killed in a collision of two express trains near Faridabad. And the year before that in April, when the Gorakhpur-Gonda Express collided with a stationary goods train at Daomingarh to kill 60...

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But this exhaustive list of probes ordered into what's now almost an annual feature—collisions—didn't seem to impress anyone at the latest disaster site. Least of all those who lay in excruciating pain at the Khanna Civil Hospital. "Train accidents, road accidents, plane accidents. India is an accident specialist. Inquiries will only discover that," fulminated a profusely bandaged Bhairon Yadav of Bihar. "My friend here had to limp to the public phone to call relatives and tell them we are alive. The nikamma sarkar (useless government) didn't even have the decency to arrange that much for us after having nearly killed us."

 Pieces of glass embedded all over her back and face, Satwant Kaur, however, seemed more ready to forgive. "I don't care how it happened, if they just tell me where my husband is. No one knows. Please find him. They keep telling me several have died," the Batla resident agonised. Pathetically pleading with everyone in sight to help locate her "tall, heavy sardar", she helplessly cursed and coaxed those around her by turns.

LIKE Satwant, many others writhed in frustration and fury at the sheer inadequacy of the support system provided for Mission Clean-up at Kauri. The accident site had just two phone lines, an overworked fax machine and a couple of well-meaning but ill-prepared railway officials as props delivered by the world's largest democracy to cope with the tragedy. Barely legible passenger lists, hand-scribbled names of the dead and the injured and indecipherable photostats listing the hospitals where the injured had been transferred did rounds of fumbling hands as tense relatives drove hundreds of miles to find out the fate of their loved one.

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 "Considering they are so regular and systematic with their accidents, the railways should be better prepared to deal with deaths and disasters at a larger scale with the passing years," said Vineet Kochchar, voice dripping angry sarcasm. Having discovered his gravely injured relative in a Ludhiana hospital earlier, Kochchar was in a tizzy trying to locate the former's wife. After three hours of questioning sympathetic but confused officials, which yielded half-baked guesses, his tension was apparent.

As were the shortcomings of those amid the mangled wreckage. Huge cranes undid the collision chaos with hundreds of people at dangerous proximity. This, while personnel from the Security and Accident Relief department of the railways worked their way into heaps of iron more on a trial and error basis than with any visible expertise.

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 "Many might have died because we couldn't get them out on time," mumbled Rajkumar Singh, part of the volunteer scouts group from the railways, many of whom were hanging around simply as onlookers for want of better instructions on their deployment. Another scout, Harjit Singh, admitted his training did not equip him to handle anything as horrendous as this accident. Visibly shaken, he said: "People are looking up to us for assistance but I am so frightened myself. I never expected to be in these kind of circumstances. Why did this happen?"

 According to an unofficial version from a railways officer, the accident could have happened because of three reasons. First, a broken track could have caused the derailment. Second, there could have been a breakage in the overhead electric line. But the official feels that the third explanation is the most likely: that the maintenance division might have overlooked the fault in the coupling in the Frontier Express.

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All three possible causes are incidents of gross negligence. Which makes a mockery of the railway minister's "informal chat" with the media at the accident spot, when he said that the scale of the disaster would have been much less if only the derailed coaches had toppled over into the fields on the other side instead of the tracks.

Quite obviously, when so much is left to chance by way of maintenance and service, chance plays havoc in more ways than one. Trains will topple the "wrong way" if they are poorly maintained and run on ill-serviced tracks. Worse, if toppled trains become annual events forgotten in all but some probe files gathering dust somewhere, then they add to the indignity of the dead passengers. Dead passengers who lie on those rows of ice. After an avoidable, last journey to nowhere. Thanks to the Indian Railways.

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