TRANSPORT-INDIA: Ageing Tracks, Bridges Threaten Rail Safety

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 28 2001 (IPS) - Traffic flow on India’s ageing railways may be increasing at the cost of safety, as shown by last week’s train tragedy that saw a 140-year-old bridge give way under a speeding express in southern Kerala state.

India’s Minister of State for Railways O Rajagopal admitted after Friday’s accident at Kadalundi, which claimed more than 50 lives and left another 250 were injured, that nearly half of the country’s 120,000 railway bridges were more than a century old.

Rajagopal insisted that just because a bridge is more than a hundred years old does not mean that it is risky — but said a final verdict could be had only after a probe into the mishap by his ministry presents its results in about two weeks.

The minister shot down demands for a full-fledged, independent judicial inquiry, saying they were pointless because on past occasions they have taken too many years to make pronouncements on major accidents.

But what is obvious is that the condition of bridges, tracks and signalling equipment, most of them dating back to the steam era, has simply not kept with the massive increase in traffic density over the last century.

Ashok Kumar, chairman of the Railway Board, blamed slow upgrading of infrastructure, or even the complete lack of it, to a serious shortage of funds. “We have been managing by slowing down trains before they approach bridges that are considered unsound or stressed,” he said.

But the fact that the bridge over the Kadalundi river was not considered stressed and had even passed muster at an inspection carried out on Mar. 29 cannot be encouraging to the millions of people who use the Indian railways.

Every day an estimated 14 million people, not all of them ticket holders, travel on what is the world’s second largest railway system every. Many ride on the roofs of carriages or hang out of the doors for lack of space. Safety is clearly a secondary concern.

According to M K Mishra, a former member of the railway board, over the last 50 years passenger traffic on the railways has gone up by more than 500 percent and freight by 600 percent, but inputs have been less than 200 percent.

When she presented the annual railway budget for the current year, Mamata Banerjee, who later resigned as railway minister, complained that she had nowhere near the four billion U.S. dollars that an expert committee head by Justice H R Khanna recommended be invested on safety.

But Banerjee, known for extreme populism, shied away from raising passenger fares or significantly hiking freight to mobilise resources that could have gone into renewing bridges and tracks. “We are not a commercial enterprise but a public utility,” she said.

Apart from the 55,000 bridges that need urgent repair because they were more than a century old, some 17,000 km of track in India’s 62,000 km network badly need replacement.

“If safety is to be ensured, the present financial constraints on the Indian Railways need to be reduced and larger allocations made for safety,” said Madhu Dandavate, a former railway minister and distinguished economist.

Dandavate said it is time that the Indian railways stopped being made to shoulder social obligations, at a time when other countries are actually subsidising their railway networks.

Typically a passenger can travel in a reserved compartment from Kerala to New Delhi, a distance of well over 2,000 kilometres, for under 20 dollars provided booking is made a month in advance.

Dandavate said what is truly unforgivable is the habit of populist railway ministers of overloading already saturated tracks with newer services, or increasing the frequency of existing ones without sparing a thought for safety.

A direct result of such overloading was the 1998 disaster at Khanna in western Punjab, which claimed 200 lives when a train was thrown off tracks that simply fractured under strain.

In August 1999, more than 300 people died after two trains collided head-on at Gaisal in West Bengal state because an emergency system, which automatically locks brakes when drivers fails to respond to signals, had not been installed — for lack of funds.

According to Anand Mukherjee, an expert on railways with the International Chambers of Commerce and Industry (ICCI), the only way out for the Indian Railways is to attract megafunds from foreign private investors.

In Mukerjee’s opinion, what is needed is to duplicate and create parallel systems and networks through massive infusions of private funds rather than rely on comparatively meagre development funds from the World Bank or similar institutions.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has listed the Indian Railways as one of the major government-run enterprises due for a drastic reduction in “expenditure subsidies” and “restructuring” — or in other words, privatisation.

But privatisation is no simple solution — it is certain to result in massive hikes in passenger fares, which would mean leaving most of India’s traveling millions stranded.