The Indian Railways on Thursday said about 30,000 people had lost their lives in the past three years due to trespassing and other untoward incidents around Railways premises, while maintaining that there were zero passenger fatalities due to consequential accidents.
The statement came close after the Niti Aayog raised questions over the reliability of the Railways’ data on no passenger fatalities in 2019-20.
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In a letter to Railway Board Chairman V.K. Yadav, Niti Ayog CEO Amitabh Kant had also pointed out that thousands lost their lives annually in the Mumbai suburban railway section. “I would like to draw your attention to the fact that many of these deaths are caused by people falling overboard or from the platform, on to the tracks. Hence, this should not be excluded from the purview of RRSK [Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh]. It should be ideally recorded officially,” Mr. Kant had said in the letter.
Replying to a query on the same, Mr. Yadav on Thursday said during a virtual conference that the Railways kept a record of all the deaths that had occurred on its premises, but under three separate heads — consequential accidents, trespassing, and untoward incidents.
“It is true that consequential accidents were indeed zero in 2019-2020 and so far this year as well…We keep a record of deaths due to trespassing, like when people come on the tracks and are run over... In the last three years, around 29,000 to 30,000 people have lost their lives due to either trespassing or untoward incidents,” Mr. Yadav said.
Following the briefing, a Railways spokesperson said more than 8 billion passengers had travelled by trains last year and the Railways achieved zero passenger fatalities due to accidents in the last year after a lot of efforts.
“While the deaths of passengers due Railway accidents has become zero, unfortunate casualties do occur due to trespassing and untoward incidents like falling from trains, and that [is] due to negligence or carelessness on the part of passengers/ public. These are incidents on which Railways have little or no control. Efforts are on to sensitise the public on avoiding such situations,” the spokesperson said.
DFC target pushed
The deadline for completion of the ₹81,000 crore Dedicated Freight Corridor project has been pushed by six months to July 2022 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Yadav added.
The project, which consists of the 1,504-km western freight corridor from Dadri (Uttar Pradesh) to the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust near Mumbai, and the 1,856-km eastern corridor from Ludhiana (Punjab) to West Bengal, was scheduled to be completed by December 2021.
“We suffered a setback due to the coronavirus pandemic which led to issues with labour mobilisation. The new deadline is June 2022,” Mr. Yadav said, adding that now the work has restarted but at a slower pace.
