THE railway accident involving the Indore-Patna Express at Pukhrayan, near Kanpur, has taken a terrible toll.  146 passengers perished and over 250 were injured, some of them maimed for the rest of their lives. Accidents of this type in the Indian Railways are not an aberration but are becoming alarmingly frequent.   There have been 80 major railway accidents this year against 69 in the previous year.  Thousands of minor railway accidents take place every year. 

As usual, an enquiry will be conducted to ascertain the cause.  The railway minister, Suresh Prabhu, has promised the “strictest action against the guilty”.  But who really are the guilty? There are 1.27 lakh posts vacant in various safety categories of the railways.  The government’s commitment to safety is evident from the continuous decline in the allocation of funds for ensuring safety in the railways.  The allocation and spending under the appropriation to the depreciation reserve fund in the rail budget is a factual record of this decline. In the 2015-16 rail budget, Rs 7,900 crore was allocated under this fund. But the revised estimate show only Rs 5,500 crore was the actual amount allocated. In the railway budget of 2016-17, only Rs 3,200 crore has been allotted.  This compared to Rs 6,000 crore allotted in 2008-09.

Nearly half the accidents that occur in the railways are due to derailments. This shows the neglect of track maintenance and timely track renewal. When derailments occur, the coaches in use made by the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) tend to collapse into each other which is the main cause for the casualties.  LHB coaches of the new design are in use mainly in the elite trains like the Rajdhanis and the Shatabdis.  There are 40,000 coaches of the old design in use today. But the railway ministry and the railway board do not intend to replace these coaches in the near future.  The Anil Kakodkar Committee on Railway Safety in 2012 had recommended allocation of funds to the tune of Rs 10,000 crore for complete switching over to LHB coach production over five years.   But this has not been done.  At present, in 2016-17, only 1,253 LHB coaches will be produced.  At this rate, it will take thirty years to replace the ICF coaches. 

The culpability of the Modi government as far as skewing the priorities away from the basic safety requirements in the railways, is established.  Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself has set the priority for acquiring high speed bullet trains. The proposed Ahmadabad-Mumbai bullet trains project in collaboration with Japan is expected to cost a whopping Rs 98,000 crore. It is this expensive showpiece project which is getting a huge outlay, not the project to produce LHB coaches to replace the old ICF ones. 

Under Suresh Prabhu, the Indian Railways is becoming a dual, segregated transport system.  One is an elite stream of high speed trains with new design coaches and exorbitant fares catering to the upper brackets of the population.  This stream will gradually get privatised.  The other stream is of passenger trains run with the older model coaches, poor services and maintenance and perpetually running late. With the present safety standards, accidents in both the segments are guaranteed.

So if the guilty are to be identified for the Pukhrayan railway accident, the trail leads straight to the leaders of the government and the railway board and not to some gangmen or maintenance staff. If anyone has to take responsibility for gross negligence of safety, it is the railway minister himself.

The railway budget has been scrapped and it is the general budget which has to provide the financial wherewithal for the railways. There is no excuse now for the Modi government. It has to reorder its priorities – make the Indian Railways safe for people to travel in.  Any backsliding from the safety commitment would amount to grave dereliction of duty.