At 9.30 pm on June 2, when Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Union minister for railways, landed in Goa to launch the Vande Bharat train from Panjim to Mumbai the next day, the officials who met him at the airport looked unusually grim. Then, they broke the bad news that there had been a triple collision between the Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express, a goods train and the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express at the Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore, Odisha. Vaishnaw knew the terrain well, having served as the district collector of Balasore in the late 1990s when he had made a name for himself for ensuring there were zero casualties in his jurisdiction during the Super Cyclone of Odisha in 1999. When he heard of the accident, among the first things Vaishnaw did was to call up the war room at the railway headquarters to check with senior officials if the national disaster management team had been dispatched. Next, he called his contacts in Odisha to make sure that the rescue operations were in full swing. Vaishnaw cancelled the function to launch the new train in Goa and took the same plane back to Delhi. At 3.30 am, boarded a chartered flight to Bhubaneswar, and after a three-hour journey on an inspection train, he reached the site of the accident. His haste was well-warranted.
The carnage he would have encountered is evoked by the words of Souvagya Ranjan Sarangi, 25, a pharmacist who runs a small chemist shop near the station, and had the misfortune to witness the crash. “The ‘blast’ hit me hard in the ears. It felt as if an earthquake had hit Bahanaga. I jumped across the counter and saw some bogies tumbling around.” Bhagabat Prasad Rath, whose house was near the station, also heard the explosion and rushed to the spot. “People were wailing loudly,” he says, “and I had to negotiate the body parts strewn all over. I saw a well-to-do person crying for help. I helped him get up and he walked some distanceAt last count, 288 people had died and close to 1,200 were injured, making this one of the worst crashes in the history of the Indian Railways and forcing us to ask again: how safe is rail travel in India? But first…
