LADHOWAL, India, 16 May 2003 — At least 39 people were burned to death when a fire raced through the packed carriages of an express train near the northern city of Ludhiana yesterday. Rescuers said some of the victims died because baggage was blocking the exits.
Some 170 men, women and children were trapped in the blaze that swept through three of the 15 carriages of the Frontier Mail at 3:45 a.m. (2215 GMT), said officials at the site.
“The door of a carriage was blocked with luggage and the smoke blinded the terrified passengers,” said infantry Sgt. A.D. Singh, who, along with six other troopers on board the train, rescued many passengers.
“I saw my wife and two children burn to death. The smoke was so intense I could do nothing to save them,” A.L. Shahji, a soldier, said.
Eleven children were among the dead. Other passengers escaped the inferno by jumping out of windows and smashing open steel doors.
Rescue workers carried the grotesquely charred bodies on stretchers from the smoldering carriages as experts sifted through the gutted coaches to discover the cause of the accident.
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee said there were reports the blaze was sparked by a burning cigarette or an electrical short-circuit, while Aaj Tak television quoted officials as laying the blame on a bursting cooking stove.
“It is impossible to identify the bodies as most of them are charred, and our estimate is that 39 people have died, although some of the bodies may have been burned and broken in two,” a railways spokesman said at the site.
The roof of one of the carriages melted in the heat, a rescuer said, adding the fire appeared to have started from that coach, which was packed with 70 passengers.
The economy-class carriages at the rear of the express were burned, they said, adding that the bodies of 35 of those killed came from a single coach.
Thirteen others were injured in the fire aboard the train after it pulled out from the station of Ladhowal, seven km from Ludhiana in India’s northern Punjab state.
The train was heading to the northern city of Amritsar from Bombay.
S. N. Tiwari, chief surgeon of Ludhiana’s state-run hospital, said many of the survivors suffered serious injuries.
Vajpayee, vacationing in the resort of Manali, said an investigation would establish whether sabotage or accident caused the fire. “So far no one is talking about sabotage. It could be so. But only a full investigation will bring out the facts,” he said as New Delhi offered 400,000 rupees ($8,330) in compensation to the families of each of those killed.
Vajpayee expressed grief over the accident and said he hoped the Indian Railways would install better safety measures. “We hope that there are no such accidents in the future where people lose their lives,” he said, as India’s former Railway Minister Ramvilas Paswan called for the resignation of his successor, Nitish Kumar.
“The accident is the result of government negligence and the rail minister should accept moral responsibility for this accident and resign without fuss,” Paswan said. “It is ridiculous to suggest a cigarette caused such a tragic accident,” he said as the railways ordered a statutory investigation of the accident, the second in five years involving the Frontier Mail.
The train, the oldest service introduced 19 years before India’s 1947 independence from British colonial rule, caught fire 10 minutes after it left Ladhowal, a railways spokesman at the site said.
Indian Railways, one of the world’s most antiquated rail systems, daily carries 13 million passengers. Last month the state-run utility unveiled plans for a massive upgrade of tracks, bridges and track signals to bring down a high number of accidents. It earmarked a sizeable chunk from its planned expenditure of 106.07 billion rupees ($2.20 billion) in the financial year to March 2004 for passenger safety measures. Most of India’s worst train tragedies are caused by poor maintenance, although there have been cases of sabotage to train tracks by separatist rebels.
