Budget 2024: Travelling in trains uncomfortable and unsafe?

In 2023, Indian Railways completed 170 years of its existence in June. Writing on passengers’ experience, architect and sculptor Gautam Bhatia observed in The Hindu:

Conditions in the second-class compartments, both reserved and undeserved, can naturally be left to the imagination. Videos of passengers travelling, packed like sardines, inside toilets and of course on every inch of the floor in coaches during festivals, examinations and interviews are now commonplace.

Complaints of poor hygiene and food are frequent and having outsourced most of the services, the Railways seem to have little control over the vendors.

An increasing concern of both train crews and passengers is, however, safety. Loco pilots and signalling personnel complain of being overworked due to the refusal of the Railways to fill up vacancies. Punctuality, inspections and maintenance have suffered as a result.

In December 2022, railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had informed Parliament that 3.12 lakh non-gazetted posts were vacant in the Railways. In an RTI reply to Madhya Pradesh-based RTI activist Chandra Shekhar Gaur in June 2023 railways conceded that 2.74 lakh posts were vacant with more than 1.7 lakh of them in the safety category, in Group C alone.

There are nearly 20,000 vacancies for loco pilot/assistant loco pilot positions, but the Railways issued a recruitment notice for filling up only 5,658 posts earlier this year. This was revised to 18,799 vacancies only after protests, following a series of accidents.

The result has been alarming.

In February 2024, two diesel locomotives with 53 wagons loaded with stone ballast rolled out of Kathua station in Jammu without a brake van and without loco pilots. The ‘pilotless train’ could only be stopped after 70 km, as it rolled downhill because of the slope and gradient of the terrain.

By routing the runaway train through unoccupied lines, a major disaster was averted.

The inquiry revealed that the pilot and the assistant pilot had completed their duty hours and had requested to be relieved at their base station, which was nearby. However, they were directed to report to another station, much further away, and leave immediately in a passenger train that had arrived.

This was not the first report of ‘pilotless trains’, however, and indicates an alarming systemic failure.

In October 2023, a passenger train collided with the rear of another passenger train on the Howrah–Chennai line near Kantakapalle station, leading to the death of 14 passengers, as well as of the pilot and the assistant pilot of the train that came from behind and the guard of the train in the front.

In March 2024, railway minister Ashwani Vaishnav blamed the crew of one of the trains for watching a cricket match on a mobile phone, leading to the accident.

The inquiry by the Railways, however, reported no such distraction!

According to a former member of the railway board, the report actually recorded that the crew had undertaken nine different operations in the 10 minutes preceding the accident, thus discounting the theory of distraction.

Loco pilots complain that while their cabins have motors that keep the passenger coaches air-conditioned, they themselves work in unbearable heat, which affects their health.

The cabins do not have urinals either, and with the induction of women as loco pilots, conditions are both embarrassing and inconvenient. 

The failure of the railways to install and integrate the anti-collision signalling system ‘Kavach’ is yet another sore point.

When a goods train rammed into Kanchanjunga Express in June this year, resulting in 11 deaths, it was conceded that the line did not have the system in place.

A paper published by PRS Legislative Research claimed that at its current pace, it would take the Railways 50 years to install the system and cover the entire network. The slow and limited capacity of the industry was blamed by the Railways for the slow rollout of Kavach.

The indigenous system was adopted three years ago, after extensive trials, and chosen over the established European system.

Experts believe that it is possible to accelerate the production of Kavach and simultaneously deploy the European system on major trunk routes.