Mumbai is a sprawling city of 13million people and growing in size and population every year. There is a need to travel great distances to the work place and back for adult men and women and to the place of learning and back for students. In addition, there is tourist travel, en-route travel, travelling to home place and back for the immigrants, business travel, travel for shopping, medical needs and the usual day-to-day human requirements for living. Travelling, therefore, is the greatest daily human activity and business in Mumbai.
All types of travelling systems are used for travel into Mumbai, i.e., air, sea, road and rail; however, within the city, road and rail travel predominate. Of these, the bulk of the people are carried by the suburban railway system. It is estimated that over 6.5million people travel by the railways daily in Mumbai city. It would be reasonable to assume that a similar number may be travelling by vehicles daily on the roads of Mumbai.
Rail Travel
The local or the suburban train system, which was, without doubt, an efficiently planned system at one time, carries the largest number of commuters in Mumbai; today, the number of travellers has far outgrown its capacity. The consistent effort by the railways to increase the capacity periodically has not been able to keep pace with the migration of outside population to the city. Though stressed beyond limits, the suburban train system is doing its job of carrying the bulk of traffic fairly well even today, but it is not without its risk.
It is not necessary to go into minute details of the existing railway tracks, work-in-progress and future plans for the purpose of this article; suffice it to say that the total length of rail tracks on the Western Railway from Churchgate to Virar is 228km and Central Railway from Chatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) to Karjat, Kasara, Diva-Vasai and by harbour line from CST to Mahim and Panvel is 548km as on date. That brings the total length of all the railway tracks to 776km in the Mumbai suburban area. Work is in progress at many places to increase the number of tracks and there are time-bound plans for expansion for future right up to the year 2020.
From the point of view of safety, the suburban train system has two major risk factors to contend with-accidents and crime.
Accidents
| The types of accidents and the casualty figures in the Central Railway from CST to Karjat, Kasara and Panvel and in the Western Railway from Churchgate to Virar combined together as per statistics provided by the Government Railway Police, Table 1: Data on Railway Accidents | |||||
| 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | |||
| Accidental Deaths | |||||
| While crossing the railway line | 2227 | 2078 | 2148 | ||
| Falling off the train | 646 | 617 | 532 | ||
| Others | 142 | 104 | 127 | ||
| Total Accidental Deaths | 3015 | 2799 | 2807 | ||
| Injured Persons | |||||
| While crossing the railway line | 1147 | 1127 | 856 | ||
| Falling off the train | 1454 | 1336 | 1413 | ||
| Others | 144 | 151 | 218 | ||
| Total Injured Persons | 2745 | 2614 | 2487 | ||
| Terrorism Casualties | |||||
| Deaths due to Bomb Blast | 0 | 0 | 11 | ||
| Injured due to Bomb Blast | 0 | 25 | 82 | ||
| Total Terrorism Casualties | 0 | 25 | 93 | ||
| Total Casualties | 5760 | 5438 | 5387 | ||
The Table shows that total accidental deaths in Central and Western Railways, together, are about 3,000 in a year (plus/minus 8%). The total injured persons in the railway accidents are 2,600 (plus/minus 6%). It is evident from this data that 75% of the railway-accidental deaths in Mumbai occur due to collisions between people and trains while the people are crossing the railway lines in defiance of the rules and sound advice; the cause of about 20% of the accidental deaths is people falling off the trains. The other reasons for accidental deaths in railways are: people falling in the gap between the platform and the coach while struggling with other passengers to board the trains in a rush and some travellers hanging outside the compartments die when they get hit by poles, trees or any such stationary object close to the rail tracks. In addition to these, a total of 11 deaths occurred on account of terrorist activity in the year 2003.
The record of the injured persons shows that on the average about 50% of the people are injured because of falling off the trains while 35% of the people are injured while crossing the railway tracks and about 15% due to other causes. Terrorism accounted for 25 people being injured in the year 2002 and 82 in the year 2003.
The trend of the accidents is seen to be on the decline and the credit must go the efforts of the police (GRP), the volunteer passenger organisations, such as the Mumbai Suburban Railway Passengers' Association and the railway authorities in the measures taken to reduce the accidents and increase safety awareness among passengers. A lot more needs to be done.
In the ultimate analysis, the single most important cause leading to fatalities in railway accidents is unauthorised crossing of railway lines. It is forbidden to cross railway tracks, except at authorised and controlled level crossings, but people still avoid using the foot bridges and take short-cuts across the railway lines at all places, some of which are at bends with reduced visibility. Also, the criss-crossing of rails at both sides of the railway stations often confuses the commuter about the track the trains are likely to run on. The high speed of the trains and the great distance required to bring the train to a stop practically rules out the option to halt the train to save anyone crossing the rails.
Looking into the entire accident record, one fact comes out loud and clear is that most of the accidents are caused due to the fault of the people themselves in the form of disregarding rules or because of carelessness or hurry. Also, excess of passengers over the capacity is the root cause of the extra rush during boarding and alighting leading to risky behaviour such as fighting, pushing and jostling to get into the trains and some forms of risky travel practices such as hanging outside the compartment or travelling over the roof of the coaches, etc. Of late, it is also seen that overcrowding is the major cause of fights between the passengers inside the compartments, resulting in the weaker or the outnumbered passengers being thrown out of a running train - a very brutal, callous and inhuman behaviour.
The railways have taken many steps for improving the rail-safety, such as:
• Improvement and updating of the signal system,
• Increasing the number of rakes to increase capacity,
• Adding more tracks to increase capacity and speed up traffic,
• Removal of some of the vertical poles close to the tracks,
• Reduction of the distance between compartments and platforms.
The railways refuse to take any responsibility for the accidents caused on account of unauthorised crossing of the railway tracks, people hanging outside the compartments, people sitting on rooftops of trains or people falling between the platform and the compartments. While legally they may be justified, it is not a very humane approach, for many accidents are caused due to their own carelessness too, such as piling of the sleepers or other railway items far too close to the tracks, construction of cable carrying or any other structure on the walls of tunnel that could cause injury to the people who may have some parts of their bodies protruding out of the compartments. Sometimes railways are reluctant to remove vertical poles too close to the tracks due to so-called technical difficulty. Vertical poles too close to the tracks can always be removed if there is a will to do it. A suitable technical solution can always be found and implemented.
There are standards given such as the maintenance of a minimum horizontal distance of 7ft from the centre of the tracks to the vertical poles, 5ft 6inches (plus/minus 6inches) from the centre of the tracks to the face of the platform and 2ft 6inches (plus/minus 3inches) height of the platform from the top of the rail to maintain a safe vertical clearance between the compartment and the platform. However, these can not always be adhered to on account of the variety of technical reasons and space constraints, e.g., the
level of the rails is consistently required to be raised to avoid water logging of the rails or track maintenance and then there is the vertical alignment of tracks and proper sloping to be ensured. The railways have failed to achieve the co-ordination of the raising of platform level with that of the rails because both works fall under different heads, different supervision and different budgets. Nevertheless, that calls for additional expenditure and the railways are perpetually short of funds and suffer budget-cuts.
Make Rail-Travel Safe
The major works by the railways apart, it is quite possible to make rail-travel safer by adhering to the set norms of railway safety, high quality of maintenance and vigilant supervision by the railway authorities, observance of rules and regulations by all without exception, avoiding risky behaviour/practices while travelling and by adopting humane values of tolerance and universal brotherhood by the passengers.
The railways must build sufficiently broad and strong foot-bridges/subways for crossing the tracks and also close the crossing points, frequented by the pedestrians for crossing the tracks with fencing, etc. Effective ways to avoid accidents for the citizens are: self-vigilance, adherence to the rules/regulations and following safe practices, that means no crossing of rail-tracks by the passengers, no hanging outside trains, no sitting on train roof-tops and no jostling while boarding/alighting from the trains, especially moving trains.
No comments:
Post a Comment