Global Courant
As giant excavators tried to untangle crushed trains on Saturday at the site of India’s worst railway disaster in decades, a solemn scene played out at a small school a few hundred yards away.
In humid air filled with the smell of human flesh, family members underwent the harrowing exercise of identifying their loved ones from about 120 dead bodies lying on the ground after Friday night’s crash.
Among the searchers was Miyah Jan Mullah, who had come from neighboring West Bengal to find his son Musavir, who was on his way to his tailoring business in Chennai. When Mr. Mullah finally found Musavir’s body, most of it had been burned, but his face was mostly intact.
“When I saw my son’s face, I thought he had just gone to sleep,” said Mr. Mullah. “But when I looked at his body, I raised my hands to God and asked him what I did that my flower turned into charcoal?”
At least 288 people were killed and more than 700 others injured in what officials described in a preliminary government report as a “triple accident” involving two passenger trains and a stationary freight train in the eastern state of Odisha. Officials said they were investigating signal failure as a possible cause of the crash.
The toll, which is exceptionally high even in a country with a long history of fatal accidents, raises long-standing questions about safety concerns in a system that transports more than eight billion passengers a year.
It has also dented, albeit temporarily, what emerges as one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature appeals as he gears up for a third term next year – his massive effort to modernize India’s long-running infrastructure.
Mr Modi was due to commission the latest in a series of new high-speed trains on Saturday, with the rollout of each planned to build momentum for his campaign. Instead, he arrived at the devastating wreckage site in Odisha to assess the damage.
“We will not be able to bring back the people we have lost. But the government lives with their families in their grief,” Modi said after visiting the site. “This is a very serious incident for the government. We have provided clues to all lines of investigation and whoever is found responsible will receive the harshest punishment. They will not be spared.”
When Mr Modi left the scene after viewing the wreckage, a large police detachment struggled to hold back a crowd of thousands that had gathered nearby. Excavators removed what was left of the collided trains, and railroad workers attempted to clear the tracks so train service could resume.
Survivors of the crash said their train was packed with hundreds of migrant workers, students and day-wage workers who were shoulder-to-shoulder in at least three general compartments — most of them standing — when the trains collided.
“It was full of people,” said Sayel Ali, who was admitted to a hospital near the scene of the accident. “You could only see heads. When the accident happened, I couldn’t see anything. I don’t know how I ended up in the hospital.”
Some initial details about the cause of the disaster began to emerge, although much remained unclear.
According to an initial government report seen by The New York Times, a high-speed passenger train from Kolkata, the Coromandel Express, collided with a freight train stalled at a station in a small town, Bahanaga Bazar, at around 7pm local time. time. The passenger train “ran across the station at full speed because it was not supposed to stop” there, the report said.
After a collision with the freight train, the passenger train carrying 1,257 passengers derailed. Twenty-one of his carriages bounced off the track, three of which were sprawled on another track.
“At the same time,” according to the report, a passenger train from Bengaluru to Kolkata, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express, carrying 1,039 passengers, was traveling in the opposite direction – on the tracks the three dislocated carriages lay on. This second collision caused the last two carriages of the third train to go off the rails.
Officials were yet to explain why the freight train was stopped, nor why the Coromandel Express was not warned of its presence on the track, which caused the whole disaster.
Aditya Kumar Chaudhary, head of public relations for Southern Eastern Railways, confirmed reports that a “preliminary investigation” had determined the cause was likely due to signal failure. But Mr Chaudhary said those initial suggestions should be checked in a thorough investigation.
“The train was supposed to go for the main line, but a signal was given for the loop line. That is what the regulators have been pointing out,” Mr Chaudhary said. “There are a lot of ifs and buts. It needs to be checked and crossed.”
“It was a devastating scene because the train was moving at high speed, at full speed,” said Sudhanshu Sarangi, the head of the Odisha fire brigade, after arriving at the scene of the accident. “The freight train stopped; the other two trains were running.”
Shashwat Gupta, 25, an IT worker who along with his sister and her children had boarded one of the trains in Kolkata to visit his parents in Cuttack town, Odisha, said their coach was “sitting at a 90° angle. degrees” was tilted. ‘ after a sudden jerk.
“I was able to find the emergency window and we managed to get off the train,” he said. “In the other coaches I heard screaming, crying. There was a lot of blood.”
The government in Odisha, home to about 45 million people, has declared a day of mourning. Dozens of trains were cancelled. Teams from the Indian Army, Air Force and National Disaster Response Force were mobilized to assist. And people near the crash site standing in line to donate blood.
Ashwini Vaishnaw, the railway minister, told reporters on Saturday that he had ordered an investigation to determine the cause of the crash.
“Our immediate focus is on rescue and relief,” he said from the scene of the disaster. “We will know more after the investigation.”
Friday’s disaster was the deadliest since a 1995 crash that killed more than 350 people when two trains collided 200 kilometers from Delhi.
India’s railway system, one of the largest in the world, was first developed in the 19th century by the British colonial authorities. Today, more than 40,000 miles of track—enough to wrap around the Earth about one and a half times—spread like capillaries across a country about twice the size of Alaska, stretching from the Himalayas to tropical rainforests.
Passenger safety has come under scrutiny in India in recent years.
In 2012, a committee appointed to assess the safety of the rail network cited “a grim picture of underperformance, largely due to poor infrastructure and resources”. It recommended a host of urgent measures, including improving tracks, repairing bridges, eliminating at-grade crossings, and replacing old rail cars with ones that better protect passengers in the event of an accident.
In 2016, 14 railway carriages derailed in the middle of the night in northeast India, killing more than 140 sleeping passengers and injuring 200 others. Officials at the time said a “break” in the tracks could have been responsible. In 2017, a nighttime derailment in South India killed at least 36 passengers and injured 40 others.
The Modi government has spent tens of billions of dollars renovating and modernizing old trains and tracks, accelerating work to improve train safety. As of 2020, India had not recorded any passenger deaths in serious train accidents for two consecutive years. It was a first and Mr Modi’s government hailed it as an achievement. Until 2017, more than 100 passengers were killed every year.
Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research who previously served on the Indian government’s restructuring committee, said “a fair amount of capital investment” had actually reduced the frequency of accidents in recent years.
“Twenty or 30 years ago, India had built a lot of things but didn’t have the resources to keep them all running,” he said. “But now, even though the economy isn’t growing very well, this kind of spending isn’t falling short.”
Sameer Yasir reported from Balasore, India, and Mujib Mashal and Hari Kumar from New Delhi. Reporting was contributed by Alex Travelli, Karan Deep Singh and Suhasini Raj in New Delhi, Mike Ives in Seoul and Dan Bilefsky in Toronto.
