Global Courant
They cram millions into India’s congested trains every day, chasing a shred of economic opportunity in the vastness of the world’s most populous nation.
Tickets costing about $5 – almost a day’s wage – are all they can afford. For that, they shoulder to shoulder for long distances amid so-called general category carriages, a far cry from the air-conditioned cars that sit behind the pantry where workers prepare the rice, roti, and chai for the journey.
It was these packed general coaches, right behind the engine of the Coromandel Express, that became a scene of unthinkable carnage just after sunset on June 2 when the train slammed into a parked freight train in eastern India at 80 miles per hour .
Nearly all of the 288 dead were in those three carriages at the front of the train – a fact, confirmed by officials, that has gone almost unnoticed in India. Unlike the 1,200 people in reserved seats, those in the general carriages were officially nameless; the rail service had no record of their identities. Their names and other details only emerged when they were taken to hospitals, or when a loved one traveling hundreds of miles identified their bodies in a morgue.
In the government’s initial reports of the crash, India’s worst train disaster in decades, passenger numbers included only those in reserved seats, almost as if the hundreds in the general carriages didn’t exist.
“It was all people like me, poor,” said Rahul Kumar, a 28-year-old carpenter who was in one of the Coromandel general coaches on his way to the southern city of Chennai. “Day wage workers, day laborers and people who can’t afford a ticket in the next compartment.”
The rail disaster has once again highlighted how unevenly the burden of India’s inadequate infrastructure falls on the poor.
With train routes of around 40,000 miles, India has one of the world’s largest and oldest networks – and arguably the most congested.
It is an affordable lifeline for the tens of millions of young people who have to uproot themselves to make ends meet. Of the 20 million daily passengers, according to Indian Railways, six out of seven have unreserved tickets, especially on suburban trains: they flow in and out of the overcrowded cars as the trains make their stops in small towns and cities.
A senior Indian official said the three crushed general buses of the Coromandel Express detained a total of about 300 people. That figure corresponds to the official capacity of the cars; accounts from the train indicate that the number could be significantly higher. Railway officials have said only two of the dead identified so far were from the reserved carriages.
While passenger loads in this country of 1.4 billion people have more than tripled over the past 50 years, the capacity of the rail network, in terms of track miles traveled, has only increased by about 40 percent. The network carries about eight billion passengers per year double the Chinese network transports on a larger and much newer network.
The biggest barrier to improving safety and performance on India’s network is dangerous levels of congestion, said Alok Kumar Verma, a retired chief engineer of India’s North East Frontier Railway. Indian Railways data shows that about 6,000 miles of the central and main “main routes” are operating at 125 per cent capacity, Mr Verma said.
This not only puts a strain on the track, but also on the staff working on the track, and there is not enough time for maintenance.
Indian officials acknowledge that railway upgrades and expansions have lagged far behind investment in roads. But annual spending on India’s rail system, they say, has increased eightfold compared to about a decade ago. Tracks are rebuilt and added much faster, and safety technology is introduced.
The overall number of major rail accidents – such as collisions, derailments and fires – has fallen by about two-thirds over the past decade, and casualties from such events have fallen into double and single digits in recent years, according to official data.
Yet there are nearly 20,000 scattered railroad-related deaths each year, many from things like falling from an overcrowded car or getting hit by a train.
The hundreds of people in hospitals and the bodies scattered in morgues in the days following the Coromandel crash spoke to the section of India’s population dependent on the railways.
The lucky few who survived had to pick themselves up and continue their quest for a living – or return home broken. For most, it was unthinkable that a loved one could afford to travel hundreds of miles to provide assistance. They could count one thing in their luck: the cyclone-ravaged state of Odisha, the site of the crash, has a well-oiled emergency response system that rushed to the rescue and saved lives.
For the unfortunate, their quest for a better life ended here, on the road.
Some of the dead were identified in the days that followed – by injured friends leaving their hospital beds to search the morgues; by relatives who traveled hundreds of miles on government-organized buses and trains to claim the deceased; or through pictures of their disfigured faces on government websites.
Others, nearly 100 in all, remain in the morgues – unidentified and unclaimed.
Mr. Kumar, the carpenter, said his family only learned that he was alive three days after the accident because he had lost his phone. After a first round of surgery, he returned to his village in the northern state of Bihar in an ambulance from a Sikh charity.
He has frequently used the Coromandel Express over the past five years after he and his brother expanded their carpentry business to Chennai, the southern city.
The income from their furniture repair shop in Bihar failed to meet the needs of their family of eight. After Mr. Kumar’s brother, Nitesh, went to Chennai for work, where he could earn more, Mr. Kumar also started spending time there – for short appearances or to buy new tools and return to Bihar.
On June 2, Mr. Kumar arrived early morning Kolkata on an overnight train from Bihar and waited in the heat for about 10 hours for the Coromandel Express to be ready to depart. The train was packed, with many passengers holding their bags in one hand and holding a cab chain in the other for support. Some sat on the floor; the exit doors of the bus were completely blocked.
Mr. Kumar managed to get a seat by being one of the first in the swarm. What saved him, he said, was a chance event: A family of three sitting next to him asked if he would be willing to swap his seat with one used by a female relative in the back of the car.
“When I regained consciousness, half the compartment was up in the air, the other half was gone,” he said. “As I was crawling to the gate, I noticed a red headgear belonging to the woman I had swapped seats with. They were all dead on the floor.”
The daily struggles of the poor in India go largely unnoticed. For many on the Coromandel, attention fell only on them in disaster, as workers cut through the tangled carriages to drag the bodies out, watched by cameras and crowds of onlookers.
“It doesn’t matter if we die at home or in a train accident – we are nobody,” said Madhu Sudhan Haldar, 24, one of the survivors of the general coaches, who essentially grew up on construction sites. “After a few days, everyone will forget that so many people died.”
