Railways should concentrate on safety, punctuality

VIJAYAWADA-VIZAG SEGMENT AMONG SAFEST

An Indian train running on a faulty engine is not rare. Rakes or coaches running without engines for kilometers are not infrequent either. Minor derailments often do not come to public notice but a major brake failure leading to over 30 deaths and 150 injured as in the prime Rae Bareli parliamentary constituency on March 20 exposes the state of Indian railways plagued by many ailments.Studies have shown that rail loco drivers are forced to do overtime, often suffering from fatigue and drowsiness as the train rolls on. The failures cause extra detention. A 2002 study found that extra detentions of locos resulted in a loss of their earning capacity to the tune of Rs.117.72 crore. In the 13 years since, this loss is estimated to have quadrupled.

This raises the moot question of whether Indian railways should invest in expensive high-speed trains or use the Rs 60,000 crore to create a more efficient and modern infrastructure. Indian Railways carries over 25 million passengers through 7,083 stations daily. Annually, Indian Railways ferries 7.2 billion passengers (nearly six times the country’s India’s current population). It runs as many as 19,000 trains daily of which some 12,000 trains carry passengers and 7,000 for freight. The railways claim that the number of accidents and derailments has come down drastically. This may not be true but considering the number of trains it runs, rail accidents are not that frequent.

So what caused the 11 railway accidents involving express trains in 2010 alone, and why has there been a sudden spurt in accidents during recent years? The study has, in a scientific way, pin-pointed the reasons. Apart from clearly establishing a well-known cause—the disproportionate increase in railway traffic which the existing infrastructure is unable to handle— it has also identified zones that are insufficient to handle the congestion and reasons for this.The study’s authors Saptarshi Ghosh, Avishek Banerjee and Niloy Ganguly have identified two main causes for rail accidents in 2010. The study identified the most risk-prone ‘trunk segment’ as the Delhi-Tundla-Kanpur one and identify the Vishakhapatnam-Vijayawada trunk segment from the southern zone as the “safe standard” based on empirical evidence that it has not had any accident so far.

Another parameter is the headway, or time lapse between two trains as they cross the same point. The possibility of two trains coming dangerously close to one another increases as the headway reduces. They found two segments clearly coming out as risk-prone segments—the Delhi-Kanpur segment and the Ahmedabad-Surat segment. The Vishakhapatnam-Vijayawada segment has a much higher headway and was therefore safer, relatively speaking.Of the two lower headway segments, the Ahmedabad-Surat segment has trains with low headway running throughout the day whereas in the case of the Delhi-Kanpur segment, trains get bunched up in the early hours. Often, it leads to delays of up to four to five hours during normal weather conditions.

Runtime delays of trains on these segments were also studied. While 20 per cent of the trains on the Delhi-Kanpur segment were delayed by more than an hour, only about three per cent of the trains on the Vishakhapatnam-Vijayawada segment were delayed to that extent. The delays reflect the high degree of congestion and frequent waiting of trains at the signals and hence the possibility of an accident.The railways require investment and manpower. The Centre is expected to improve rail infrastructure and not just have a fad for speed. Safe and punctual trains are the need of the hour rather than hi-speed trains.

By Shivaji Sarkar