New Delhi: Three days after one of the worst railway accidents in Indian history led to the deaths of 275 people, news reports continue to point to recent efforts by various apex bodies stressing the necessity for safety.Business Standard has reported how in a review meeting in April, the Railway Board chairman had flagged a 37% rise in consequential accidents as a “matter of grave concern”. Because many of these accidents involved goods trains and were thus not casualty-heavy, they had invoked little concern.Minutes of a Railway ministry safety review meeting in April studied by the newspaper showed that the CEO and Chairman of the Railway Board, Anil Lahoti, had raised the rise in consequential accidents and called it a matter of serious concern.According to the report, the board also highlighted track issues, and problems with signalling and operations, and other ‘systemic deficiencies’. Notably, signalling trouble is one of the issues that are preliminarily believed to have led to the three-train clash in Balasore in Odisha on June 2.The board also sought to highlight the fact that SECR and East Coast Railway crew worked beyond shifts that ranged for 12 hours. Shortage in Railway human resources was also flagged by the Congress party in a detailed statement yesterday, June 4. The statement also noted that a Right to Information request has revealed that more than 3.11 lakh posts out of the nearly 15 lakh Group C posts and 3,018 out of the 18,881 gazetted cadre positions are lying vacant in the Indian Railways.A separate report by Business Standard has highlighted how the Railways witnessed 11 train collisions in five years since 2017-18. Although collisions are not the bulk of train accidents, which include derailments, level-crossing incidents, fire and other events that make up 20 times the number of train collisions, the report notes that the ‘Kavach’ system of avoiding collisions has been implemented only in a limited way.Similar numbers were also revealed in a CAG report which was reported on by The Wire yesterday. In it, the auditor said that almost seven out of 10 rail accidents between 2017-18 and 2020-21 were derailments triggered by track defects, engineering and maintenance issues and operating errors.Most reports probing the collision have highlighted how safety appears to have been compromised upon in spite of a large budget allocation.
