In a country where both major industries and political fortunes are often tied to a vast, intertwined railway system, India has poured lavish public funds into new trains, but the purse strings are much tighter when it comes to ensuring the safety of those already along the way. to race. its traces.
Those decisions loomed large on Sunday in the aftermath of a devastating train crash that killed at least 275 people in eastern India. Investigators said they were focused on the possibility that the signal failure could have led to Friday’s three-train accident, the country’s worst train wreck in years.
The crash, which also injured more than 1,100 people, occurred when a passenger train traveling south at about 80 miles per hour towards the city of Chennai went on the wrong track and hit a parked freight train, say the authorities. The derailed wagons of the first train then collided with a second passenger train approaching, leaving a bloodbath.
In recent years, India has been polishing its long-decayed infrastructure like never before, and its railways, which are at the heart of the world’s fifth-largest economy, have benefited in the first place. The government spent nearly $30 billion on the rail system in the past fiscal year, up 15 percent from the previous year.
But the amount spent on basic track maintenance and other safety measures is falling. A report last year by India’s Auditor General, an independent agency, found that funding for track renewal work was falling and officials had not even spent the full amount earmarked.
With over 20 million passengers riding India’s railways every day, many of them migrant workers, a politician can’t go wrong by pouring money into the system, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done just that, without little fanfare. The budget for the train system, one of the largest in the world, is five times what it was when he took office this year.
But most of Mr Modi’s initiatives have not focused on the basic steps needed to get trains from point A to point B without accidents, but on improving speed and comfort. He praised the new Vande Bharat electric trains connecting several cities and a Japanese-style bullet train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, though they are unlikely to do anything to improve the daily lives of ordinary commuters.
The government says the investment is part of an effort to elevate the experience of riding Indian railways to a world-class level and attract investment from abroad.
However, spending on safety improvement programs for India’s fleet of more than 13,000 older trains has fallen as a proportion of the total and even in absolute terms, according to the most recently released budgets.
Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, a New Delhi-based organization, mentioned one need in particular. “The signaling function could perhaps use a little more attention,” he says. “Strategically, signaling is a soft capacity addition, and as we move to higher speed trains it will become more important.”
As devastating as Friday’s crash may have been, train travel in India is much safer than ever.
Derailments were once frequent, averaging 475 per year from 1980 to about the turn of the century. In the decade leading up to 2021, that number dropped to just over 50, according to a railroad officials paper presented at the World Congress on Disaster Management.
Rail safety in India, more generally, has also improved, with the number of serious train accidents falling steadily: to 22 in fiscal year 2020 from more than 300 a year two decades ago. In 2020, India had recorded no passenger deaths in rail accidents for two consecutive years – a milestone praised by the Modi government. Until 2017, more than 100 passengers were killed every year.
India has been splurging under Mr Modi, with the Treasury and the World Bank hoping that private companies will follow the government’s example and pump more money into the economy. The World Bank noted in a report in April that India’s government spending on long-term goals “has increased from prepandemic levels.” Transport, including the railways, plays a major role in this increase in expenditure.
“In the 21st century, the growth and reform of the railways is essential for the rapid development of the country,” Modi said at the inauguration of a railway line last year. “A nationwide campaign is underway to transform the railways.”
Auguste Tano Kouamé, the World Bank’s country director for India, said high government spending on energy distribution, new highways and railways would “crowd out” more corporate spending in pursuit of long-term profits.
Three months ago, intent on promoting homegrown safety technology, India’s Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw made a show of placing himself and the Chairman of the Railway Board on two trains on a collision course. The idea was to demonstrate the new system, called Kavach, or armor.
The two trains raced toward each other on a single track. At a distance of 400 meters – about 440 meters – the new system braked automatically.
But the Kavach system is installed on only a small fraction of India’s trains, covering about 900 miles of the total route, more than 40,000 miles. It was not used by the trains that crashed on Friday, and an opposition politician, Mamata Banerjee, a former railway minister, took advantage of that.
“If the device had been on the train, this wouldn’t have happened,” she told reporters.
Dr. Mukhopadhyay, the research associate, said that if the crash turned out to be due to a signal error, “something like Kavach could have been useful.”
Mr Vaishnaw, the Minister of Railways – whose resignation has already been demanded in some circles – rejected the suggestion.
“This accident is not about the collision avoidance system,” he said.
Sameer Yasir contributed reporting from Balasore, India, and Mujib Mashal And Suhasini Raj from New Delhi.
