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By Ambreen Ali, Agence France-Presse
MUMBAI: Every morning college student Siddhi
Sarangdhar squeezes herself onto a Mumbai train and hopes she will
survive the journey to school on the world’s busiest—and
deadliest—rail network.
The death toll on Mumbai’s railways averages a
dozen a day—more than a whole year on New York’s subway system,
which has an average annual accidental death rate of eight.
“It’s a big achievement getting on. Then
standing is really difficult and getting off is another problem,”
said Sarangdhar.
Mumbai’s rail system brings 6.5 million
commuters into the city every day, six times the traffic of New York
trains.
The result, railway officials say, is trains
packed to 2.5 times capacity during rush hour—which here in
India’s financial capital is called “super dense crush load
time.”
Railway cars designed for 200 passengers are
crammed with 500 at peak times.
In the first four months of this year, 1,146
commuters died and 1,395 were injured, railway police said.
Many of the victims had been hanging on the side
of the packed trains, unable even to wedge themselves inside, and
fell to their deaths after losing their grip, they said.
Last year’s total toll was 3,997 deaths and
4,307 injuries.
“We could enforce a limit on the number of
people on a train but people still need to go to work. They’ll sit
on the tracks and stop trains from moving,” Central Railways chief
security commissioner BS Sidhu said.
“Overcrowding can be prevented only by very
broad alterations to the system,” he said.
$2 billion, part of it from a World Bank loan,
have been earmarked to improve public transport in Mumbai, a city of
18 million, by 2015.
But although authorities are working to increase
the number of trains and their frequency, commuter figures appear to
be growing at a faster pace.
While a third of deaths are of passengers losing
their grip on the side of the train, nearly half are people hit by
trains as they stroll on the tracks.
“The number of preventable deaths should come
down in the years to come. But unpreventable deaths are
unpreventable,” Sidhu said.
Unpreventable deaths—from the railway’s
view—include those passengers hit by trains when crossing tracks
to get to another platform, illegal but not unusual.
Railway authorities have tried to combat the
practice—by fining tens of thousands of lawbreakers, erecting
fences and asking people to identify places where footbridges should
be built.
Still, in Mumbai “nobody in their senses will
walk one (extra) kilometer to cross a foot bridge and then walk one
kilometer back,” said Sidhu.
It was while strolling across the tracks at
Borivali—Mumbai’s second-deadliest station—that Samir Zaveri
lost his legs when he was 18. He fell in front of an approaching
train and it sliced through his legs.
“It was my mistake, not the railway’s,”
Zaveri, 37, who has artificial legs, admits.
Nevertheless, this year he decided to sue the
railway for wasting crucial time when a passenger is injured.
“Immediate treatment can save lives. Sometimes
it takes two to three hours for the railways to deliver” an
injured victim to a hospital, he said.
In 2003, a high court ordered railway stations
to have ambulances standing by for accidents, but many do not and
there are regular reports of injured passengers left beside the
tracks while the trains continue rolling.
And then there is India’s infamous red tape.
“The railways must get a stretcher, inspect
the body and write a memo about the injury. Then an ambulance is
requested. Much time is lost,” explained TS Bhal,
ex-superintendent of the Government Railway Police.
Bhal started a nonprofit society four years ago
to provide ambulances for railway victims after he saw an
unconscious railway victim raise his hands after being left for dead
on the platform for three days.
“I’ve seen bodies lying in pieces
unattended,” he said.
“The railway staff is not interested in
providing transportation facilities to victims.”
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