India's train crash shows chronic lack of investment in improving safety, experts say

The deaths of nearly 300 people in one of India's worst train accidents highlights the urgent need for modernisation, with millions of people a day burdening a colonial-era network suffering from lack of investment in improving rail safety, experts have said.

At least 275 people died and some 900 were wounded on Friday following a massive three-train collision in Odisha. The Coromandel Shalimar Express, a passenger train, derailed near Balasore, hitting a goods train. Another train, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast, crashed into both the derailed coaches. A preliminary report indicated the accident was the result of signal failure.

Passenger and freight trains were running again on Monday, rumbling past the debris of smashed carriages from the crash.

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India's rail networks, built by the colonial British government, are one of the world's oldest. They carry as many as 25 million passengers a day, with some 19,000 trains running daily at over 7,000 train stations. Despite government efforts to improve rail safety, several hundred rail accidents happen every year.

Experts say a lack of investment into upgrading rail existing infrastructure has compounded the network's problems.

"India's rail infrastructure suffers from years of underinvestment," said rail consultant Lalit Chandra Trivedi, who has been in the industry for 18 years.

Trivedi said signals and tracks in India did not support "speeds higher than 110km/h", resulting in the underutilisation of railway vehicles that are capable of running at 160km/h. "There has been no induction of engineers into the system for the last couple of years," he added.

While passenger fares are highly subsidised, and more trains have been purchased to meet increasing travel activity and heavy freight, India's railway tracks have suffered from years of lack of maintenance.

The metal tracks, which contract and expand according to the weather, were not built to accommodate the pressure of fast-moving trains that now ply the country. Many railway bridges and culverts are weak and need to be replaced.

Indian Railways, the body that operates the country's rail system, recently floated tenders for self-propelled ultrasound detection systems to reduce train derailment due to rail fracture. But manual labour is still required for now to physically assess kilometres of tracks for any defects.

Derailment is often caused by signalling, mechanical and civil engineering failures. A 2021 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India revealed that lack of track maintenance was the main reason for derailment, followed by mechanical problems and defects in wagons.

Swapnil Garg, a professor of strategy management at IIM Indore, a business school in Madhya Pradesh, said Friday's crash was a result of a system failure that "could have been avoided by adequate safety systems in place", as two trains should not have been travelling on the same tracks.

"The important thing ... would be to reduce the speed of all trains to 60km/h, and when two trains are near each other they have to reduce the speed to 20km/h," he added.

The crash happened due to the "change that occurred during electronic interlocking", railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had said on Sunday, referring to a technical term for a complex signal system designed to stop trains colliding by arranging their movement on the tracks.

Debolina Kundu, a development studies professor at the National Institute of Urban Affairs in New Delhi, called on the Indian government to set up an automated system to monitor railway movement and accord track maintenance the "highest priority".

"The Coromandel Express hit a static goods train by entering the loop line instead of proceeding on its mainline towards Chennai, possibly due to human error," she said. "To avoid such accidents in future, there should be more close monitoring of railway movement through an automated monitoring system to avoid human interface."

A real-time information system should be set up across India to track train locations and speeds more closely without any manual intervention, Kundu added.

Kavach, an automatic train protection system developed in 2022 by Indian Railways, sends alerts when a loco driver skips a signal, which is the leading cause of collisions. The system can bring the train to a halt automatically when there is another train on the same line at a prescribed distance. But Kavach is yet to cover the entire network. Local reports said Indian Railways installed Kavach on only 1,445km of tracks so far, following successful trial runs.

Experts also called for more training to equip staff with the necessary skills for high-intensity operations, with Trivedi highlighting a manpower shortage in critical safety areas such as loco pilots and signalling staff.

"The railways have to place emphasis on training of officials and inspections at regular intervals," Garg said.

The 2021 report had also cited the prolonged working hours of loco pilots due to an acute manpower shortage as another cause for derailment.

Garg said India needed to change its mindset on being a "poor country with resource constraints", even when the government had allocated funds for upgrades. A rail safety fund was introduced in 2017-18, but funds allocated for track renewals were reportedly not effectively utilised.

"But I think we are on the right track," Garg said. "Modernisation and safety standards are improving and we have to give them a little more time before we use this opportunity to condemn the railways."

This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

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