Editorial: Yet another tragedy on tracks

There is always a sense of déjà vu surrounding train accidents in India that occur with depressing regularity, followed by ritualistic announcements of compensation and inquiry. The death toll is eventually reduced to cold statistics and then it becomes business as usual. No lessons are learnt from the tragedies of the past. Another disastrous rail collision, this time in West Bengal’s Siliguri involving Kanchanjunga Express and a goods train, has left nine passengers dead and over 40 injured. The mishap has once again exposed the chinks in the country’s railway signalling and emergency response systems. It has now emerged that the driver of the goods train disregarded the signal and rammed into the Kanchanjunga Express from behind, leading to the derailment of three rear compartments of the passenger train. The ill-fated train, carrying over 1,300 passengers, was travelling from Agartala in Tripura to Sealdah in Kolkata when the tragedy occurred close to New Jalpaiguri station. A combination of a signalling fault on the tracks and human error by the driver of the freight train appears to have led to a deadly collision, a problem that is not unfamiliar in the Indian context. If only corrective measures were put in place learning from similar blunders in the past, the Kanchanjunga tragedy could have been averted. Moreover, ‘Kavach’— the indigenously developed automatic train protection system to help prevent accidents if two trains are travelling on the same line — was not available in this particular section.

And, to add to the woes, the automatic signalling system between Ranipatra station and Chattar Hat Junction, where the accident took place, was defective since the early hours of the fateful day. The latest tragedy comes a year after India witnessed one of its worst rail disasters — a collision involving Coromandel Express and two other trains in Odisha’s Balasore district that claimed over 290 lives. The Balasore mishap had raised hopes that lessons would be learnt to prevent such accidents. However, the situation on the ground doesn’t seem to have changed. In October last year, a collision between two passenger trains on the Howrah-Chennai line in Andhra Pradesh’s Vizianagaram district claimed 14 lives; in February this year, a freight train ran driverless for about 70 km from Kathua (Jammu) to Dasuya (Punjab) — it was just a stroke of luck that no major accident happened. The spotlight is back on Kavach, the ‘train collision avoidance’ system aimed at preventing accidents due to human error. It is being implemented in a phased manner, but the pace of route coverage is rather slow — in stark contrast to the government’s emphasis on speed on the rail tracks. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Japanese counterpart Fumio Kishida have pledged to expedite the bullet train project, but the West Bengal mishap has shown that safety must take precedence over the glitz and glamour of ultra-fast trains.