Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu may have offered to resign over two train accidents within a span of four days, but a closer look at the Railways’ safety record over the NDA’s tenure throws up an interesting dichotomy. Even as serious train accidents have declined, the cases of train derailments grew steadily, highlighting the Railways’ systemic deficiencies.
The total number of consequential train accidents has declined from 135 in 2014-15 to 107 in 2015-16 and 104 in 2016-17.
However, this was mainly on account of fall in accidents at unmanned level crossings — the onus of which falls mainly on road users who crash with a running train — from 50 in 2014-15 to 29 in 2015-16 and 20 in 2016-17.
Secure level crossings
This also reflects that the government has been successful in developing secure level crossings such as road over bridges and road under bridges. It has exceeded its targets for elimination of unmanned level crossings since 2014-15.
But the worrying trend is that derailments went up sharply to 78 in 2016-17 from 65 in 2015-16 and 63 in 2014-15. Derailment accounted for 75% of the total rail accidents in 2016-17 compared with 60.7% in 2015-16 and 46.7% in 2014-15.
Till August 20 this financial year, 23 out of 27 rail accidents happened only because of train derailments.
The total number of casualties in train accidents was at a two-year high of 238 in 2016-17 – mainly on account of the derailment of the Indore-Rajendranagar Express near Kanpur which was one of the worst such train accidents in over a decade.
The share of accidents due to the failure of railway staff is consistently increasing since 2012-13. In 2016-17, 61.5% of the accidents happened due to failure of railway staff as against 37.7% in 2012-13.
The primary cause has been track defects that accounted for around 44% of the train derailments between 2012-13 and 2016-17. Other reasons include failure of wheel and other train components that can derail a running train.
However, the number of cases of defect in engineering assets such as tracks and welds is on the rise — from 22 in 2013-14 to 37 in 2016-17.
A task force of railway officers formed after derailment of the Indore-Rajendranagar Express train found that rail track fittings, such as plates, nuts and bolts, were “missing on a large scale” and only one-third of the requirement is met every year.
In a meeting organised of chief safety officers of all zones of the Indian Railways last year, Railway Board Member (Traffic) Mohammad Jamshed said Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu was “concerned over the rising trend of accidents.”
High density
Another glaring factor highlighted in the meeting held in June 2016 was lack of traffic block for track maintenance on high density networks of the Indian Railways.
Around 38% of total 1,200 railway line sections have full capacity utilisation and around 16% of the lines run on capacity utilisation of more than 150% at present.
“Such heavy capacity utilization poses significant risk to railway safety as undertaking track maintenance or inspection activities becomes difficult on a daily basis,” a report by the government think-tank NITI Aayog on ‘Fund Development Framework for Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK)’ noted this April.
The report noted that derailments happen mainly on Broad Gauge (BG) routes out of which high-density routes contributed to almost one-fourth of total derailments.
In the case of Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express derailment which claimed at least 21 lives last Saturday in Uttar Pradesh, the maintenance team started the welding work of the track joints near Khatauli railway station without taking traffic block from the station master. As a result, a portion of the track was without rail when the train ran over it and 13 coaches derailed.
“The major worry is that Meerut-Saharanpur section on which the train accident took place is not even a high density network. This incident highlights that maintenance work may be going on in some other parts as well without taking due consent,” a senior Railway Ministry official said.
Track renewals
The NITI Aayog report also stated that delays in renewing tracks overdue for replacement may create opportunities where rail may fail. In 2016-17, the Railways renewed 2,487 km tracks compared with 2,794 km in 2015-16 and 2,424 km in 2014-15. According to a ‘White Paper on Indian Railways’ published in February 2015, the Indian Railways has total track length of 1,14,907 km and on an average 4,500 km should be ideally renewed every year.