Archana Dalmia Chairperson of Grievance Cell, All India Congress Committee
There was a time in Mumbai when you could buy flowers and small knick-knacks on the foot overbridges that connect Elphinstone and Lower Parel. One could even stop and listen to the little street musician who sang for her living on the bridge. Now, if you get across the bridge alive, you will be counted as lucky.
The state government, approved by the Centre, was quick to change the name from Elphinstone to Prabhadevi station. But it has done nothing to upgrade the structure or enhance passenger convenience since this bridge was built in the 1800s—which is why tragedies such as the Elphinstone stampede come as no surprise.
Killing over 23 people, the stampede was triggered when commuters panicked because of a false alarm that the bridge was collapsing. The station was overpacked as people were taking shelter in the rain. More people getting off the trains swelled the crowd. Building rain shelters is one small way to avert such a disaster. This is not the first incident of the sort. Recently, a similar incident was about to take place on Currey Road, another busy stretch in Mumbai.
The incident also serves as a grim reminder of the massive collapse of an adjoining bridge at Sanvordem in Goa this May. It is not just the condition of the foot overbridges, the overall state of the Railways is pathetic. There have been three derailments in less than a month, the latest being the derailment of the Kalinga Utkal Express in Uttar Pradesh. The reason for the derailment was apparent unauthorised repairs on an emergency track. Such incidents have raised serious doubts regarding the abilities of the Railways’ track possession management when attending to track defects.
The writing is on the wall. India’s overstretched railways network is in urgent need of rehabilitation if it is to keep up with its passenger volume and improve safety standards. In fact, there appears to be a tenacious negation and an unwillingness to accept this urgent need for upgrading track standards and railway facilities, despite the heavy increase in freight and passenger trains. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made some grand announcements in the new Railway Budget in February this year. Let us see the Rail Safety Fund being put into action, which is estimated to build a corpus of `1 lakh crore. Promises are easy to make!
The last national-scale track rehabilitation occurred in 2002-03. What is the Narendra Modi-led government doing with the tax payers’ money? Why is it not reflecting in a growing infrastructure? Why is there no accountable engineering members who are supposed to control their staff? Why is there no upgradation of tracks, bridges or facilities?
There was much protest from the Opposition when the Congress-led government wanted tax reforms. But the results are there for all to see in model cities such as New Delhi, whose road and railways have been sufficiently upgraded. Now that the taxes have been increased three-fold, should it not reflect in a progress around the roads and railways system? There is none! It was the Nehru-led government that paid attention to the modernisation of trains post-Independence. After that nothing much has really been done to upgrade the railway tracks and stations built by the British during the Colonial era.
Modi-led government must realise that it takes more than introducing a new bullet train to upgrade the railways that caters to 8,300 million passengers annually. This excludes the local Metro railways that ply across our metro cities. The railways is also hugely understaffed, where one employee deals with an average of 17 customers. With this disproportionate ratio, how is it even possible to address the ills of our railways?
archanadalmia@gmail.com