No deaths, no injuries and 69 percent drop in accidents, Railways sets new record on safety

The number of consequential accidents too came down from 55 during the last fiscal to 17 in 2020-21

The Indian Railways for the first time is set to move towards zero fatalities and injuries due to train accidents during the current financial year, while the number of accidents came down by 69 percent. This is compared to five deaths and 81 injuries due to consequential train accidents during the financial year 2019-20.

Based on data available with the Indian Railways, the number of consequential accidents too came down from 55 during the last fiscal to 17 in 2020-21. Consequential train accidents include collision, derailment, fire, level crossing accidents and other miscellaneous accidents. However, run-over deaths are not considered as part of railway accidents.

Though train services were minimal during the current financial year due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this can be considered as a major achievement considering the fact that 2010-11 claimed 381 lives on tracks, the highest in the last 15 years. Addressing the performance review of zonal railways in January, Railways Minister Piyush Goyal had asked the zones to work towards achieving the goal of zero accidents through proper maintenance of assets.

The number of accidents per million train kilometre is one of the lowest in the world now from 0.29 in 2004-05 to 0.05 now. In 2004-05, Indian railways saw 234 accidents with 236 deaths and 412 injuries. The numbers started showing considerable improvement since 2017-18 when the number of accidents and deaths came below 100 for the first time. In 2017-18, the government had introduced Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) for the replacement, renewal and up-gradation of critical safety assets with a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore for five years.

The Indian Railways is in the process of implementing the Automatic Train Protection (ATP) System to prevent Signal Passing at Danger (SPAD) and has already provided the system in 595 Route Km.

In August last year, Niti Aayog chief executive officer Amitabh Kant expressed doubts over Indian Railways’ claim of having ‘zero fatality’ this financial year and just five deaths on tracks in 2019-20. In a letter to the Railway Board, Kant had said that over 2,000 people lost their lives in Mumbai suburban every year and those figures should also be part of the number of deaths reported by the Railways.

Railways had defended this stating that though consequential deaths were low, deaths due to trespassing and other untoward incidents was around 20,000 to 30,000 in the last three years. To improve safety, the railways is also in the process of replacing conventional Integral Coach Factory-design coaches with Linke Hofmann Busch (LHB) coaches. The national transporter has set a target of doing away with 16,238 conventional coaches by 2025 and another 23,090 coaches by 2030.