Mending old ways

Mending old ways

Rail safety is getting more money and attention. Rae Bareli accident reveals need for reforms too.

Last month, Indian Railways was touting its best safety record in five years citing the lowest number of fatalities in recent years. But as the derailment of the New Farakka Express at Rae Bareli and the consequent loss of lives reveals, there is much more work to be done on the rail safety front. At stake are the lives of lakhs of passengers who opt for trains because they find air travel prohibitively expensive and public road transport woefully inadequate. Only genuine improvement over time can reassure passengers about safety. Railways is passing through a period of transition and it must not repeat old mistakes.

Junking the old populist practice of railway ministers announcing new trains in every budget before fulfilling older announcements and then dispensing with the Railway Budget had signalled a refreshing change in the political approach to the public transporter. The 2017-18 budget announcement of a Rs 1lakh crore Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) to undertake safety projects over a five year period led to a rise in capital expenditure on track renewal, conversion of unmanned crossings, overhauling of old coaches and repairing of bridges.

But legacy problems remain. Track renewal, doubling and gauge conversion targets have been hampered by SAIL failing to deliver rails. Private sector steel companies must be roped in and the underperforming SAIL eased out. Another teething problem is the lax regard for safety standards among railway employees. There have been 31 accidents in the first five months of this fiscal compared to 29 in the same period last year. Perhaps, taking note of this rising trend, a recent Railway Board directive had warned field officials “that shortcuts which may lead to unsafe situations are not adopted.”

This is almost a candid admission of lax safety protocols in place despite the 2012 Kakodkar committee revealing that over 40% of accidents could be traced to railway staff. The RRSK strategy of throwing money at the problem may not be adequate in a scenario where railways have to fill nearly 1.5 lakh non-gazetted vacancies in safety responsibilities. Structural reforms are also needed. The long pending proposal of a statutory Railway Safety Authority at an arm’s length from other rail operations to avoid obvious conflict of interest requires urgent attention. The Rae Bareli accident must become a trigger for change before more lives are lost on the tracks.