NEW DELHI, 15 December 2004 — Dozens of passengers were killed and more than 100 injured when the Jammu Tawi-Ahmedabad Express train collided head-on with the Jalandhar-Pathankot local in Hoshiarpur district of Punjab in north India yesterday.
Welders cut through twisted metal in search of bodies and survivors amid the two trains’ crushed hulks, while soldiers carried out the dead. Soldiers rushed from a nearby base to help with rescue efforts.
Speaking at a hospital in Mukeriyan, the closest large town to the accident, Punjab’s Chief Minister Amarinder Singh told reporters the number of dead was 34. He said figures of 50 dead and 150 injured he had announced to the state assembly earlier were “unconfirmed.”
Later, hospital officials in Mukeriyan said another four people had died from injuries and 17 people were in serious condition.
“I don’t consider this to be an accident but murder. It was sheer negligence on the part of the concerned officials,” said Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav after visiting the injured in Mukeriyan. He ordered the suspension of the two station masters and a probe into the accident which happened just before midday. He said the station masters could face accusations of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder.”
At least four carriages were badly damaged in the collision deep in rural India, 150 kilometers (90 miles) east of the Sikh holy city of Amritsar.
Nearly 100 injured had been found, 16 of them in serious condition, said Dharam Singh, the top railway official in the area of the accident.
“We do not expect any more casualties at the site. We are now concentrating on the seriously injured at the hospital,” said railway spokesman Devender Sandhu.
The accident highlighted blind spots in India’s huge train network, which is often criticized for poor safety standards.
A “communications snag” between station masters at the two stations apparently caused the crash, with an express train and a local train allowed to travel toward each other on the same track, Singh said.
“We will order an inquiry. Only then will we come to know who was at fault,” Singh said in a telephone interview.
Most of the dead were from the local train, which apparently could not stop in time because it was negotiating a curve. It slammed into the express train traveling from Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir, to Ahmedabad in western Gujarat state.
It was India’s second major train accident this year. In June, 14 people were killed when a high-speed train derailed after hitting boulders on the track in western Maharashtra state.
Minor derailments and other accidents are common in India’s state-run system, which operates 7,000 passenger trains a day.
The sprawling rail network is 67,000 miles (108,000 kilometers) long, the world’s second-largest after China’s.
Yesterday’s crash occurred among wheat fields outside Khanpur village, between the cities of Pathankot and Jalandhar, about 300 kilometers (180 miles) northwest of New Delhi. Passengers’ relatives jammed stations along the train routes, pleading for information.
At a station in the western city of Ahmedabad, the express train’s destination, dozens of people wept as they waited for word.
