THE loss of nearly 200 lives yesterday in the three-train crash at Ghotki in southern Pakistan has evoked sympathy for the families and friends of victims. The tragedy would, however, be a little easier to bear if it were the exception on the railways systems in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Unfortunately these disasters are almost becoming the rule and they are largely caused by bad maintenance and a serious lack of investment. Pakistan has 5,500 miles of track that carries 645 million passengers each year while the Indian network at 66,000 miles has some 4 billion passenger journeys annually. Bangladesh has a busy 1,800-mile rail system. Much of this infrastructure was built by the British over a century ago and in the 1950s, the railways of the newly independent India and Pakistan were an efficient form in internal communication. But in the last half century there has been no system-wide attempt to upgrade track and signals. Yet as passenger numbers rise, rail bosses have added more and more train services to cope with demand. As the British themselves have discovered with their own creaky domestic network, railway systems repay neglect and lack of investment with disaster.
Each year, the railway accident death toll from the three subcontinent rail systems runs into hundreds with thousands injured. Though smashes like that yesterday in Sindh inevitably make the headlines, there are scores of smaller accidents in which passengers are killed or injured. There are only a few intercity expresses in India and Pakistan that can be expected to be fast, reliable and on time. The rest of the trains in service suffer frequent breakdowns. Ironically, as happened in Ghotki, the presence of high speed expresses on an otherwise increasingly gimcrack system actually increases the danger of accident. Though undoubtedly the error of a guard yesterday may have contributed directly to the smash, his was only the ultimate mistake in a chain of blunders reaching back years and to the very top of railways in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The consequences of these misjudgments simply cannot be blamed on bad luck. It is simply inadequate for fast developing countries like India to have an outdated and unreliable rail service. However rather than pouring billions of dollars along the length of a decrepit railways system, Delhi and Islamabad should be thinking of focusing initially on brand new high speed intercity lines, like those in France and Germany.
A separate program, however, must also be undertaken to deal with the inadequacies of the existing rail networks. No civilized society can treat its transport passengers, however humble, with the sort of neglect that is evidenced by the rail crashes in the subcontinent or the monotonous litany of ferry losses in Bangladesh, Indonesia or the Philippines. In the developed world, railways seem impossible to run profitably. However for countries on the threshold of commercial greatness, a major investment in railways (as happened during the industrial revolutions in Britain and Europe) is recouped a thousand-fold by the substantial boost to economic activity. The plain fact is that in the subcontinent, India and Pakistan simply cannot afford not to make this crucial investment.
