New Delhi: Recent train accidents in India point to systemic issues in the railways such as overworked train drivers, safety staff shortages and delays in implementing an automated train protection system, a policy consultations body has said.
The People’s Commission on Public Sector and Public Services also said there needs to be clarity on what railways staff must do in the event of signal failures and criticised what it said was top officials’ tendency to blame workers instead of accepting their responsibility.
Signalling errors or defective signals have contributed to three high-profile train accidents since last year, with the most recent being the collision between the Kanchanjunga Express and a goods train in West Bengal on June 17, which killed ten people.
After visiting the site of the accident, chief commissioner of railway safety Janak Kumar Garg said the automatic signalling system along part of the route was not functional and that the railways would look into whether the drivers of the two trains had followed due procedure.
A preliminary investigation following another fatal train collision, which took place in Andhra Pradesh in October, said it was caused by one of the trains involved not stopping at and then slowly proceeding past a ‘defective’ automatic signal.
The People’s Commission said on Friday (June 28) that the two accidents showed railways staff were not clearly instructed about what to do when signals failed.
It also alleged that signal failure data was no longer publicly available in the railways’ monthly statistics bulletin, which it said marked “yet another instance of hiding data from the public when such information is inconvenient to those in power”.
Long working hours, safety staff shortages
Shortages of safety personnel in the railways meant that existing workers faced high pressure, the commission said in its press release.
It noted that there were 1.52 lakh safety category vacancies out of ten lakh sanctioned posts, and that the railways recently notified recruitment for 18,799 vacancies for the post of assistant loco pilot in the wake of the Bengal accident and agitations by railway workers.
A direct result of such shortages was railway workers having to work longer hours, the commission said, citing internal circulars as indicating that loco pilots were working 124 hours a week instead of the 104 that was officially required of them.
The commission said it endorsed railway workers’ demand for “30 hours of continuous rest after 16 hours at rest at headquarters four times a month” and recommended to the government that loco pilots’ working hours be reduced to eight hours a day and 48 hours a week.
It also said women loco pilots were forced to report to work six months after delivering a child and that they were “denied menstrual leave”.
‘Top railways officials quick to blame workers’
Referring to Union railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw saying earlier this year that the Andhra Pradesh collision took place because two crew members in one of the trains were “distracted” by a cricket match, the commission said Vaishnaw did not have the “grace to apologise for his irresponsible allegation” after reports suggested this was not the case.
Railways sources told The Hindu in April there was no evidence the crew was watching cricket while on duty the day of the collision.
Kavach progress slow
The commission said the installation of Kavach, the railways’ automatic train protection system that also serves to prevent collisions, was being installed at a “lethargic” pace.
“In the last three years the system has been installed only along 1,500 km and on 65 locomotives, whereas the Indian rail system runs for 68,000 route kms and is served by more than 14,500 locomotives,” its press release said.
An analysis by The Hindu said it would require only “a small fraction of the railways’ budget” to cover its full network with Kavach, but that even at a generous estimation of its current pace of installation, it would take at least 46 years to deploy the system across the entire rail route.
“The Union government must treat the railways as a productive national asset and undertake timebound investments that decongest the Indian rail network, which is the primary cause for railway accidents,” the commission said in its communique.
It added: “The Union Budget must address this as a topmost priority, which will also make rail transport safer.”
