Global Courant
Indian officials on Friday arrested three railway workers in connection with a deadly train crash last month that killed at least 290 people.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, which is leading the criminal investigation into the train crash in the eastern state of Odisha, said the workers were arrested on charges of endangering passenger safety, wrongful death without murder and tampering with evidence.
In a statement, the agency identified the three as a senior section engineer, a section engineer and a technician. The “investigation is continuing,” the agency said.
The Coromandel Express, en route from West Bengal, crashed into a parked freight train in Odisha at 80 miles per hour, resulting in a three-way confusion with another train passing in the opposite direction.
The majority of the dead came from three general buses, where India’s poorest – often laborers in search of economic opportunity – sat shoulder to shoulder and spent much of the journey standing.
Immediately after the crash, officials said the cause was signal failure – that the Coromandel Express, which was arriving at the station at full speed, had received a green signal to continue onto a loop line that should have been blocked. Whether the cause was a technical glitch or human error was left to the investigators.
The accident became the subject of at least two separate investigations: a criminal investigation by the CBI and a technical investigation by the country’s railway safety commissioner.
While officials have not released the findings of the railway’s technical investigation, copies leaked to Indian news outlets suggest repeated red flags were missed. Among the irregularities were incorrect labeling of the wiring in the signal box that had gone unnoticed for years, according to news reports.
In recent years, India has dramatically increased investment in its public infrastructure by building new highways and airports. Expenditure on the rail system – one of the largest in the world, with more than 20 million passengers a day – has also increased about eightfold compared to about a decade ago. The country has introduced new trains and built new tracks. The total number of major train accidents has fallen over the past ten years.
But Indian officials have acknowledged that upgrades, maintenance and expansion of the track have fallen behind, leaving the service still vulnerable to mass casualty disasters.
The rail system remains so congested that about 6,000 miles of the central and main “main routes” are operating at 125 percent capacity, according to official government data.
