Concerns On Rail Safety: Serious flaws in signal system flagged in Feb

New Delhi: While Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the "root cause" of the horrific triple train collision has been identified and will be revealed soon in a report, critics have pointed to an audit report of the Railways tabled in Parliament in September last year, which flagged several serious lapses in rail safety. Also, in February this year, a senior Railways official had flagged the faulty signaling system which is now suspected to be the cause of the train accident.

India's top auditing body, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, in a 2022 report on derailments in Indian Railways sought to find out whether measures to prevent derailments and collisions were clearly laid down and implemented by the Rail ministry.

It flagged severe shortfalls in inspections, failure to submit or accept inquiry reports after accidents, not utilising a dedicated railway fund on priority tasks, declining trend in funding track renewal, and inadequate staffing in safety operations as serious concerns.

"There were shortfalls ranging from 30-100 per cent in inspections by Track Recording Cars required to assess geometrical and structural conditions of railway tracks," it said. The report also pointed to failures in the Track Management System, which is being widely discussed after the Odisha train crash. "Track Management System (TMS) is a web-based application for online monitoring of track maintenance activities. The in-built monitoring mechanism of the TMS portal was, however, not found to be operational," it said.

Flagging the shortfalls, the senior official had precisely pointed to the issue of how trains given the green signal to pass through a particular line got into the adjacent line. Pointing out that a major disaster was averted due to the alertness of a Loco Pilot in South Western Railway (SWR), he said the “incident indicates that there are serious flaws in the system, where the route of dispatch gets altered after a train starts on signals with correct appearance of route in the station master’s panel. This contravenes the essence and basic principles of interlocking”.

In his letter to the Principal Chief Signal and Telecommunications Engineer, Hari Shankar Verma, Principal Chief Operations Manager, referred to the “serious unsafe incident” that occurred at the Hosadurga Road Station in the Birur-Chikjajur section of the Mysore Division on February 8, 2023. He marked copies of his letter to the General Manager of the SWR and others.