OVERLOADED AND UNSAFE

BY SARABJEET SINGH*

The Mandor Express mishap and other recent accidents have caused great concern about the safety of Indian Railways. IR, however, insists that it is one of the safest railway systems because incidents per million train kilometres (mtkm) are one of the lowest in the world, and this record is getting better. I don’t think many are persuaded by this argument.

Indian Railways are not being untruthful when they claim that incidents per mtkm have been decreasing. However, if we ask how many days ago the last accident happened, we are surprised by the answer. I asked this question for accidents where ten or more lives had been lost and the conclusion was that on the average, the gap between successive accidents was decreasing; signifying that such accidents were occurring more often. This is paradoxical because if incidents per mtkm are reducing then fewer accidents are happening. However, if the gap is decreasing then they are happening more frequently.

The answer to this contradiction lies in the relationship between safety and number of trains. Let us assume for the sake of illustration that there is one accident per mtkm and the total train kilometres are 10 million. This implies that on the average one would expect 10 accidents in the year. If the train kilometres go up to 11 million then one could expect 11 accidents. The number of accidents can remain at 10 if the index decreases to 0.9. If we want the number of accidents to go lower, then the index must improve faster than building of trains. The answer lies in how the interplay between ability of IR to improve safety while introducing new trains works out. IR has not been able to increase safety faster than traffic build up despite its great emphasis on improving safety.

Railways and Railway Board Acts place responsibility on the railway board for making the rules, general managers for safe operation and the Commission of Railway Safety to caution the administration on unsafe conditions. However, the combined efforts of these entities have not been able to enhance safety faster than incremental build up of traffic.

The third factor in the safety equation is the political compulsions of the minister of railways. In the railway budget, the minister is expected to announce new trains and not hike fares. There is little if any debate on the capability of the railway system to add additional trains without compromising safety. A probable reason could be the difficulty in establishing a link between more trains and their impact on overall safety. Additional trains may raise the probability of an accident but where the lightening strikes is unpredictable. The minister gains politically when introducing trains and can deflect the responsibility of an accident on railway men.

Railway Board and general managers are legally responsible for working the system safely and should, in theory, resist any attempt to add trains at the cost of safety. In practice, this seldom happens since there is no method to link safety and volume of traffic. IR has, as yet, not adopted risk-modelling. The assumption is accidents happen when rules are not followed, in which case those responsible have to be made an example of. This thinking is fine as long as there is adequate capacity to take care of delays. Trains are planned to move according to a timetable and maintenance slots are provided according to arrival and departure timings. The problem starts when trains arrive late and miss the planned maintenance slot. In case the section is saturated, finding an alternative maintenance slot becomes problematic. At such times maintenance staff is hard pressed to hurry up and may hurry procedures. Such things happen when the number of trains is more than the system can handle comfortably.

Why should something like this happen? It happens because there has been inadequate investment in increasing capacity. IR loses 15 paisa on every passenger kilometre and takes care of this by charging freight more than it should. This has left IR short of funds for investments. Trains which should have been added after creating capacities are pushed on to the system because of political compulsions. That IR’s financial position was improved during Lalu Prasad Yadav’s tenure, is an example of how effects on safety can be ignored. Overloading of wagons beyond designed capacity was the mechanism used for earning more revenue. The issues of long term impact on the safety of bridges and axles and track were brushed aside, enabling IR to earn what others would take away. Railway management had no real way to counter this argument in the absence of a method of assessing the long-term impact of overloading in increasing hazard levels.

When trains are added the effect on safety should also be discussed publicly. A Safety Risk Model (SRM) is a known method of improving safety-related decisions. The model is a structured representation of nearly 120 hazardous events that could lead directly to injury or fatality during operations and maintenance of a railway system. SRM collates relevant historical accident data and using expert judgment, provides an estimation of the underlying levels of risk on the railways. The government should establish an autonomous entity, to make underlying risks public.

Indian politicians and policy makers must balance the introduction of new trains with matching capital investments to keep risk within tolerable limits. The issue of investments and more trains cannot be de-linked. We therefore need to make a risk assessment model (SRM), which informs the public of risk levels. This will help make Indian Railways a safer system since the demands for more trains will have to be balanced with additional capital investments.

*The writer is a former general manager of Indian Railways and member of the Central Administrative Tribunal.