Will Army come to the aid of all abysmal infrastructure in Mumbai?

The Elphinstone Road station foot overbridge (Express Photo by Nirmal Harindran)

Explaining why the Indian Army will now build foot overbridges at three railway stations in Mumbai, Union Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the Elphinstone Road station stampede, in which 23 people died, was a “tragedy” and that the Army had “strong operational expertise in roads and bridges construction in a short span of time”.

Military engineers are already conducting detailed inspections at three sites, one each at Elphinstone Road and its neighbouring station Currey Road, and a third at Ambivali in the far suburbs. Incredibly, construction work is slated to begin this weekend.

Mumbai’s railway commuters, who abhor a vaccuum as heartily as Nature herself, will no doubt quickly fill up these bridges that are to be built in a record time of three months. But the proposed speed-build fails to explain the fact that an additional bridge at Elphinstone Road railway station has suffered a long delay. Former Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu approved the additional bridge in April 2015, detailed cost estimates were confirmed by the finance department of Western Railway only on August 22, 2017.

The new bridges are welcome news, but Mumbai’s rail commuters would be much more grateful for clarity on how many other proposals for reinforcing infrastructure on the suburban railways are similarly delayed, whether such delays will no longer be condoned, and whether the Army will be called in at every instance of inexplicable delay.

Also, the daily disasters along the Mumbai suburban railway network where an average of nine people die everyday do not qualify as a sudden emergency or calamitous situation. The Army’s engineer corps have incredible skills and a proven track record on expeditiously completing bridges or roads in difficult terrain or in post-disaster circumstances where civilian resources are thin or challenging to mobilise. Normalising the use of those niche skills in India’s financial capital where government agencies have never had any trouble finding or applying state-of-the-art engineering solutions discredits both institutions, the Army and the Railways.

And meanwhile, the jingoism around the speed-build attempts to distract from Mumbai railway commuters’ central problem, that of overcrowding, compounded by years of neglect and capacity augmentation at snail’s pace, coupled with the near-total absence of other mass transit systems with comparable carrying capacities.

The two central Mumbai stations which the Army has begun inspections are in the heart of a major commercial hub, an area formerly occupied by mill lands where chawl residents walked to work, or cycled. As the mills and other factories closed down, and as the government subsequently opened up large tracts of mill lands for commercial development in the 1990s, the floating population in the localities around Currey Road and Elphinstone Road stations exploded.

That the railways and government planners were caught napping is evidenced by the sheer number of people who predicted a stampede on the Elphinstone Road bridge, tweeted about it and wrote, in vain, to railway authorities.

What’s more, at Currey Road and Elphinstone Road, even if the new additions dramatically reduce crowds on the foot overbridges, those crowds will continue to spill on to a road overbridge built in 1913, by the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. The new foot overbridges will not ease the load on this British-era road bridge, an almost literal case of kicking the problem a little further.

Lost in the debate over whether the Army should have been summoned to build civilian infrastructure in peace time is the fine print of other ambitious deadlines that will now almost certainly be missed. In the summer of 2016, senior officials of the Railways and state government, elected representatives and others declared an “action plan” to slash accidents on the suburban trains, by 50 per cent within two years.

That action plan involved ensuring that the height of all suburban platforms is flush with trains’ footboards, that pedestrian subways are built expeditiously, escalators installed and trespassing incidents (crossing the tracks) curtailed. The deadline for a large part of this action plan was March 2018. Three Army-built overbridges must not replace that action plan, with its early deadlines.

Meanwhile, since January this year, 2502 people have died in accidents on the suburban railway network.

Plenty has been said in recent weeks about what Mumbai’s railway commuters really need: a genuine multi-modal transport system with seamless inter-changes and adequate passenger facilities including toilets at all stations on this multi-modal network. Commuters will, no doubt, be impressed at the Army’s speedy construction. But that is yet another short-term goal. And it will be met at the cost of commuters’ belief that the second successive Mumbaikar to become Union Railway Minister will have a long-sighted vision to redeem the city’s lifeline.