AUGUST 16, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 6

Blood on the Tracks
India's latest tragedy shocked the world, but will it bring any serious improvement in railway safety?
By MICHAEL FATHERS New Delhi

Gaisal is a small, nondescript agricultural settlement, along a main road and beside a railway line, some 500 km north of Calcutta. It looks like any other rural town on the plains in northeast India, not far from the foothills of the Himalayas. It is dusty or muddy, depending on the monsoon. At this time of the year, in the middle of the rains, the countryside looks its best, with the flooded paddy fields and the landscape advancing into ever deeper shades of green. From time to time the roar of an express train can be heard, or the clanging of a freight train travelling slowly past the single platform that sits alongside the double track linking India's mainland with the country's northeast through a narrow corridor between Bangladesh and Nepal.

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At 1:55 a.m. last Monday in wet darkness, Gaisal's 3,000-odd inhabitants were awakened by what sounded like an enormous explosion. Startled and anxious, they left their humble homes to find out what had happened. "We could see a huge fire, and we ran through the rain toward it," said Mohammad Sarwar Salim. "We saw railway coaches piled up like a multi-story building. The one on top was burning. People were screaming, and there were bodies all over the place." The villagers of Gaisal were looking at one of India's worst railway disasters, a head-on collision between two trains, the Avadh-Assam Express and the Brahmaputra Mail, carrying a total of nearly 3,000 passengers. When rescue operations were called off four days later, the official death toll stood at 288. Unofficial counts put it closer to 500. In hospitals and medical schools in nearby towns, more than 400 people lay injured.

The impact of two heavy diesel locomotives--one pulling 20 coaches, the other 18--colliding at a combined speed of 160 km/h was devastating. One of the engines was smashed beyond recognition, the other lay in a crumpled mass with several coaches piled on top of it. The carriages behind the locomotives were crushed. Others rose like gigantic surf boards sliding one on top of the other, higher and higher, until they balanced precariously on the carriage beneath or fell over onto the ground. Fourteen coaches were thrown off the track. "I heard such a loud noise, I thought that we had been struck by lightning," said Dinesh Kumar, a labor contractor who was sleeping on the upper berth of the Avadh-Assam Express. "Then the train started rising as if it was going to fly. There was a lot of smoke. There was no light. Everything became dark."

The victims in the front carriages were torn to pieces by the mangled metal. Limbs ripped from the bodies of passengers hung from gaps in the wreckage. Torn arms, hands and feet littered carriages, and broken bodies were tossed like scraps of meat across the wreckage and onto the ground. It was a scene from hell. "I was horrified to find a portion of a leg of the person traveling next to me lying on my lap," said Manoj Prasad, a young businessmen on the Brahmaputra Mail heading from Assam to New Delhi.

Interns from a medical school in Kishanganj, a junction town 15 km to the south, were the first doctors to reach the site. Together with troops from an Indian Border Security Force camp nearby, they rescued hundreds from the wreckage hours before the official rescue operation began. "It was a nightmarish scene," said B.S. Rathore, one of the BSF soldiers. "The coaches were stuck together, and there were twisted bodies inside them. People had lost their arms, their legs, and there were some bodies with no heads."

Gurpreet Singh, a doctor, said most of the injured had fractures and head injuries, and they would probably survive. Others, with open wounds, were harder to deal with. Many bled to death. The medical students had no transfusion equipment. The people of Gaisal flagged down vehicles on the nearby highway to carry victims to hospitals in surrounding towns. At one of them, in Islampur, victims from the crash lay screaming on the floor as hospital staff struggled to deal with the number of injured. At Siliguri Medical College, where most of the dead were taken, social worker Aniruddha Sengupta was helping the bereaved identify their kin. "Some of the bodies are in such a terrible state," he said. "They cannot even be photographed. Identification is impossible." Late last week, 239 unclaimed bodies were cremated in a mass funeral.

By daybreak, as news of the disaster began to filter out to the rest of India, there was a scramble to assign blame. Railway staff manning two key signal stations at Kishanganj and Panjipara, which sent the Avadh-Assam Express heading east from Delhi onto the "down" line on which the Brahmaputra Mail was rushing west from Assam, ran away and disappeared. Railways Minister Nitish Kumar surprised the country by resigning, saying the accident was a case of criminal negligence. Nitish Kumar told journalists that "he had done his bit" to give priority to railway safety, but top management had failed to respond. Top management said the collision had been caused by "human error." Trade unions said it was a mechanical fault. "After every accident top officials are quick to blame low-level staff of negligence," said M. Raghavaiah, general secretary of the National Federation of Indian Railwaymen. As an official investigation into the crash got under way, India's Railway Board, the industry's supervisory body, suspended five senior managers from the northeast regional railway system, in whose territory the collision took place. The board's chairman V. K. Agarwal promised that Indian Railways, the state monopoly, would enforce "army-type discipline" among its staff to prevent future accidents.

But there was little that India's railway officials could do to restore public confidence in a network that has been deteriorating for over three decades. Spread across more than 100,000 km of track, carrying 13 million passengers and 1.2 million tons of goods daily and running an astonishing 13,000 trains each day, Indian Railways is a monolith that has fallen victim to its own self-importance and lack of investment, despite annual revenues of nearly $8 billion. Autonomous largely in name, Indian Railways has become a plaything of politicians, who see it as a way of winning votes. Economic considerations seldom enter the equation when new routes are added or old ones expanded. Over the past decade, 800 new passenger services have been introduced but hardly any improvements have been made in the system's aging infrastructure. Indian Railways refuses to publish details of its crash investigations on grounds that they are private documents and might encourage improper litigation. Its statistics on accidents--a relatively modest annual average of 400 in recent years--are often suspect (see box). In editorial after editorial, newspapers lambasted Indian Railways last week over its safety record and demanded that heads roll. "To say that Indian Railways, once our pride and glory, is now a virtual hell on wheels would be no exaggeration," declared the Times of India. "Scarce resources have been repeatedly diverted to fund populist measures, rather than upgrade rail systems. In these circumstances it is only a question of time before the tracks witness terror again."

The Gaisal rail tragedy is not India's worst. That dubious honor goes to a 1981 incident in the northern state of Bihar, where 800 people perished when a cyclone pushed an entire train off the tracks into a river. It was the world's worst train disaster. In the 1990s, most major incidents have been collisions, often caused by signal failure, the worst being a 1995 crash at Ferozabad, east of Delhi, killing 340 people.

A deadly series of mishaps followed the Brahmaputra Mail and the Avadh-Assam Express to their violent encounter at Gaisal. Both trains were running hours late. The Mail pulled out of Bongaigaon Station in Assam at 2 p.m. on Sunday. It should have left the day before from a different station, Guwahati. But that line had been closed two days earlier, after secessionist Bodo rebels in Assam attacked and derailed a freight train. Fifteen minutes out of Bongaigaon, the Mail came to an abrupt stop, halted by soldiers who had pulled the emergency alarm. They were in high spirits and wanted the train to return to the station to pick up colleagues who had been left behind in the confusion. Passengers and crew were outraged at their demand, but in the jingoistic support for the armed forces that pervades India after the recent military successes against Pakistan in Kashmir, they relented and the train reversed back to Bongaigaon. "After Kargil, people are more sympathetic to us," said Shiv Shyam, a soldier who pulled the alarm. He told TIME: "I wish now I hadn't done it."

Three hours later, at 5 p.m., the Mail finally left Bongaigaon on its 2,000 km journey across northern India to New Delhi. It moved slowly, at 40 km/h, through the rest of Assam until it reached the border with West Bengal late that night and accelerated to its normal speed of 80 km/h. Stopping briefly at New Jalpaiguri to change engines and drivers, the Mail headed south for Kishangunj, the next major junction on the West Bengal-Bihar border, beyond Gaisal.

The front two coaches had been set aside for the military. They were packed with soldiers and paramilitary forces on summer leave, returning to their homes in the north Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, through which the Mail traveled, and other states beyond Delhi--Punjab and Rajasthan. The young men were in a boisterous mood. Someshwar Thakur, a soldier, was preparing to get off the train at Kishangunj. Around him his colleagues were playing cards, cracking jokes or sleeping. They were suddenly thrown across the carriage and crushed by a mass of steel. Thakur's body was mangled, his head half severed and hanging disjointedly when rescuers got to him, too late. His friend Shyam, who had pulled the emergency lever outside Bongaigaon Station to get Thakur on board, was injured.

Behind the soldiers in the next coach was a religious group that had reserved a compartment for the journey. Like others on the Mail, they protested when the soldiers stopped the train at the beginning of the trip, but later gave in. When the train crashed, most of the passengers in those front carriages were killed. J.K. Jalan, one of the pilgrims, said all his companions miraculously survived. "We are true devotees blessed by God." He suffered two broken ribs and a spinal injury when he jumped 9 m from the top of his coach in pitch dark to the ground.

The Avadh-Assam Express was running nine-and-a-half hours late from New Delhi when it pulled into Kishanganj Junction, 20 km south of Gaisal, at 1:30 a.m. (there had been bottlenecks along the line). An electronic signaling and switching system with fail-safe interlocking devices is installed at this important station on the Bihar-West Bengal frontier. Two days earlier, however, the device had been switched off. The station temporarily changed back to its old manual system to allow new "double" tracks to be laid on a different line between Kishanganj and Kanki in north Bihar. The area is an important base of support for Railways Minister Kumar and his Samata political party. Officials said he was eager to get the work done before parliamentary elections begin next month.

When the Express pulled out of Kishanganj, it was on the "down" line, the track used by trains heading south. On that same line, the Express was heading north. It should have been on the "up" line. "What is unbelievable is that the driver of the Express had been operating trains on this track for the last 20 years, yet he failed to notice that he was on the wrong track," said Shanti Narain, a member of the Railway Board. However, P.C. Sarkar, another engine driver on that route, pointed out that even if the driver had noticed the change, he would not have questioned it. "Our job is to follow signals," explained Sarkar. As the train picked up speed it passed the signalman's cabin outside Kishanganj and stopped briefly at Panjipara, 6 km away. It had passed three signal boxes before heading for Gaisal 8 km down the line, travelling at full speed. At least six railway employees should have noticed that the train was on the wrong track. None apparently did. The unthinkable then became the inevitable. Recalls Paras Nath Chaturvedi, an elderly priest who was wounded in the head: "Suddenly, there was a loud noise like a bomb blast. The roof fell down on us and there was glass everywhere. A lady and her son were sitting beside me. They did not survive."

What went wrong? Various theories were being put forward in advance of an interim Railway Board inquiry due to be completed this week. Some reports talked of a rogue engine shunting on the "up" line between Kishanganj and Gaisal, forcing station staff to put the Express temporarily on the "down" line. Others had it that an empty freight train crossed from the "down" line to the "up" line on its way to marshaling yards, and staff at Kishanganj failed to reset the track switches. There were also reports of signals misread, instructions wrongly given and station staff being drunk.

Subir Roy, a railway commentator, is highly skeptical of official explanations and data concerning railway accidents. "Their investigation reports are totally self-serving." He refers to one bizarre report in 1988 that attributed the death of 107 people in a train crash in Kerala to a freak gust of wind that lifted the locomotive off a bridge. "This was incredible. The weather on that day was perfectly normal and quite still." In fairness, Roy hastens to point out, there is a small core of middle-ranking Indian Railways staff who perform their duties with integrity despite the general collapse of public service in the organization.

The Gaisal disaster is unlikely to be blamed on freak weather conditions, although investigators might make much of the rain. Indians now are demanding to know what action will be taken to make their journeys safer. They will want to know whether the official report on the Gaisal accident, like most such inquiries, will gather dust at New Delhi's railway headquarters--a famously accident-free zone in the heart of the capital, where mistakes are never made and alibis take the place of responsibility.

Additional reporting Subir Bhaumik/Calcutta, Meenakshi Ganguly/Gaisal and Maseeh Rahman/New Delhi