A man relieving himself on the railway tracks in Alwar district of Rajasthan was killed after a cow, hit by a speeding Vande Bharat train on the Mumbai-Gujarat stretch, fell on him.
According to reports, the stray cow walked over to the railway tracks and was hit by the incoming Vande Bharat train that flung it 30 metres away onto the man. The deceased was identified as Shivdayal Sharma, a retired electrician in the Indian Railways, an India Today report said.
Another person who was also standing nearby reportedly escaped the accident.
Shivdayal was rushed to the hospital where he was declared dead. His body was sent for a post-mortem on Wednesday morning.
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Cattle accidents on railway lines have become a nuisance in the recent past after several similar cases came to light, many of them from the Mumbai-Gujarat stretch.
Earlier this year, Union railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that the government was taking measures to prevent cattle-runover incidents on railway tracks.
In a written reply to a question in Rajya Sabha in February, Vaishnaw said that the cleaning of garbage and removal of wild vegetation along the track had begun, while they were also taking steps to sensitise the train crew on a regular basis for frequent whistling on locations prone to animals being run over.
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Meanwhile, the Western Railways has been erecting metal fencing along the 622-km-long stretch between Mumbai and Ahmedabad Vande Bharat Express route to prevent animals from straying onto the railway tracks.
