NEW DELHI, 16 December 2004 — Indian lawmakers yesterday called for the railway minister to resign as another inter-state train ran into a jeep at a railway crossing in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu killing five people traveling in the jeep.
On Tuesday, two passenger trains hurtled head-on into each other killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens.
Opposition deputies slammed the government for the spate of accidents on one of the world’s largest rail networks and demanded Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav accept responsibility and resign.
“When there was an accident during our government, the railway minister had offered to resign. Where is the railway minister now?” former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee asked in the lower house of Parliament amid noisy protests.
“Shame, shame,” MPs from Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party shouted before trooping out of the chamber in protest. Yadav was not in Parliament at the time.
Several coaches went off the tracks when the Jammu Tawi express crashed into a local train near Mukerian town in Punjab state on Tuesday. A railway spokesman told Reuters that the death toll from the accident had risen to 38, and 53 people were in hospital with injuries.
Another official said two stationmasters had been suspended for alleged dereliction of duty and the railways had filed a police report to bring charges of criminal neglect against them. “How could they have allowed two trains to be running into each other on the same track,” a Railway Ministry spokesman said. “Were they asleep ?”
But newspapers and commentators said successive governments had failed to upgrade the railways’s vital infrastructure, and safety standards had been falling over the decades. “An accident waiting to happen,” the Indian Express said, adding its investigations showed that one reason for the train crash in Punjab was colonial-era signaling equipment that had broken down a day before the accident.
The Express said it found a “crumbling communication network and virtually non-existent infrastructure” in the rural stretch of Punjab where Tuesday’s accident took place. “Killing laxity”, read a headline in The Hindustan Times.
Railway Minister Yadav who toured the accident site promised strong action against those found responsible for what he called a “brutal murder”.
The Indian rail network operates nearly 14,000 trains a day, carrying more than 13 million passengers, but has about 300 accidents a year.
The rail system is saddled with huge losses because of its rock-bottom fares and a bloated workforce, leaving little for investment in infrastructure and safety.
“There has always been talk of upgradation in terms of tracks, communication, but it has happened only in certain sections,” said political commentator T.R.Ramachandran on state-run Doordarshan television.
“Human life is precious, but it’s not taken seriously here,” he said.
