Last year, a loco pilot of a Mainline Electric Multiple Unit (MEMU) train and a truck driver were killed when the speeding passenger train rammed into a boulder-ferrying truck at the Kannamangala gate on the outskirts of Bangalore.
Deaths due to train hits at unmanned crossings are not new. While the railway mechanism of keeping a tab on such unmanned crossings seems to have failed, one man has come up with a solution which works if we go by his experiment in one of the unmanned crossings in Mumbai. Due to his experiment, deaths came down from 35 to just 1!
Meet Biju Dominic, who experiments with cognitive neuroscience to reduce such deaths.
Always interested in human nature than man-made machines, Biju, a BTech in mechanical engineering from College of Engineering, Thiruvananthapuram, he found his calling in the science of cognitive neuroscience and behavioural economics. Following his pursuits, he formed FinalMile Consulting which practises Behaviour Architecture. That was 2008. In 2009, he turned his attention to public safety with a project to minimise deaths from trespassing along Mumbai’s suburban railway network.
In his experiments, Biju installs three images of a speeding train; one in long shot, second in mid-shot and finally, a close up shot and the eventual consequence. "The person who is thinking to make a pass faster than the train, starts envisaging a series of things which ultimately hinders his gut from making a pass," says Biju, who uses the science of cognition, which is a group of mental processes that includes attention, memory, producing and understanding language, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.
He has applied the concept near one of the level crossings between Bangalore and Chikballapur on an experimental basis. All this, absolutely free of cost.
Speaking with City Express, he says, “You cannot put a price tag when it comes to saving lives. The Bangalore DRM, Anil Kumar Agrawal and his team were up at 12 am to show me the newly installed interventions at one of the unmanned level crossings in the outskirts of Bangalore. This sort of enthusiastic response to your work is worth more than a fat cheque.”
Biju started his survey with Mumbai Railways first where they had spent more than 400 hours beside the tracks to understand the problem of trespassing. To get a feel of the real dangers of trespassing, his team wore ordinary clothes and mingled with the other trespassers and crossed the tracks at several places.
He said, “We believe that the best way to understand human behaviour is not by speaking to them but by closely observing their behaviour in the actual context. So our research for trespassing problem involved identifying 14 station areas that constituted close to 85 per cent of accidents, identifying the exact locations where the accidents have happened in the previous 12 months, and observing the nature of trespasser's behaviour in each of those accident spots.”
The research on the accidents at unmanned level crossings was carried out across several such crossings in high visibility areas in Rajasthan and Maharashtra and low visibility places in Kerala and West Bengal. The findings revealed that accidents happen more in places where the visibility is very good. Born in a small village, Nedumkunnam in Kottayam Dist, Kerala, his search to unravel the science behind this ingenuous act led Biju to the world of Cognitive Neuroscience and Behavioural Economics. He combined these new sciences to pioneer a new approach to understand and influence human behaviour.
He says, “When we formed FinalMile, I was invited to conduct a session for the General Managers of Indian Railways at the Railway Staff college in Baroda. Vinay Mittal (presently the chairman of railway board) who saw how this science has helped reduce trespassing deaths in Mumbai, asked us to help Indian Railways solve an even larger problem- the problem of accidents at unmanned level crossings. We studied the problem across different parts of the country, developed innovative solutions and successfully experimented the solutions for this problem too.”
He adds, “The DRM of Bangalore division heard about the solutions during my session at the staff college. He immediately got into action and decided to roll out the solutions. Bangalore division on Indian Railways then becomes the first railway system in the world to try a behavioural based approach to reducing accidents at unmanned level crossings.”