After a catastrophe like the triple train collision that occurred near Balasore in Odisha on June 2, thoughts inevitably turn to rail safety. To understand the nature of the challenge, one must grasp the sheer enormity of the Indian Railways network. If you lay all of India’s running railway tracks in a single line around the Equator, you can go around the earth twice. A whopping 102,831 km, even if you exclude auxiliary bits like sidings and yards. Include those and you can finish the third trip around the planet with a couple of thousand miles to spare. Last year, it carted nearly across overpopulated cities, booming towns and. Stack on to that some 1,400 million tonnes of freight, moving between buzzing economic centres and bases of natural resources to points of despatch. The Indian Railways is a behemoth of an organisation with over 1.1 million employees and is the largest public sector employer. It is a ministry of the Union government, which means it has to deal with political pressures on various fronts—from subsidised fares, mollycoddling favourite sectors and recommendations for jobs. Yet, it has to run with the efficiency of a private corporation because of its criticality for the economy while maintaining public safety. What’s called for, therefore, is a nearly superhuman effort to bring down to zero the statistical probability of a mishap across billions of points of vulnerability.
