JAYANTA SHAW / AFP
After the impressive train crash in India that killed at least 288 people and injured 900, the emergency services ended the rescue operations this Saturday, June 3rd.
INDIA – Following the world’s worst rail disaster in a decade, India is beginning to grasp the scale of the accident in the east of the country that has already killed nearly 300 people and injured more than 900.
The accident, which occurred early in the evening of this Friday, June 2, began with the derailment of an express train connecting Bengaluru and Kolkata, which was stranded on a different track. Minutes later, another train, the Coromandal Express, running from Kolkata to Chennai, crashed into the derailed train, with some of its carriages crashing into a stationary freight train nearby.
While India has experienced several major railway disasters in the past, this new tragedy is the result of great efforts by the railway network of the world’s most populous country (1.45 billion inhabitants), points out Jean-Joseph Boillot, Associate Researcher at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations ( IRIS), specialist in India and major emerging markets, author of India for Dummies, published by First.
He returns to this accident and its aftermath for The HuffPost.
The HuffPost: The world’s worst train disaster in ten years. Is such an accident in India surprising?
Jean Joseph Boillot: Yes, in a way it is. If we look at the last ten years, there have been few accidents in India – very few fatalities – while there were around 900 fatalities in rail accidents worldwide in 2021.
In Europe alone there were an average of 51 accidents per country, 237 of them in Germany. However, Germany has almost 80 million inhabitants, twenty times less than India. The previous serious accident occurred in India in 2016 with 152 fatalities.
What is the status of rail transport in India and in particular its modernization?
It’s already an impressive and extremely modern organization, even if its motto is thrift. Indian Railways (the public company that runs India’s railway network) transports almost 8 to 10 billion passengers a year on a relatively small network (68,000 km), more than the entire world population. For comparison: In China, the network is 220,000 kilometers long. The Indian network is therefore much denser, many people are transported on a few railway lines and there are very many bridges (150,390).
It is also an extremely complex system that is fully computerized. The Indians are known to be “geeks”. India Railways has undergone remarkable modernization since the 1990s, including a train reservation system that I believe is the simplest and most efficient in the world. You can also book your tickets with a small Nokia cell phone. And all this with a beat per kilometer transported, which is the lowest in the world, which explains the popularity of rail transport in India.
That’s not to say that such a complex and dense organization doesn’t face accident problems. In this case, however, it is not a technical accident, but a human error: A blocked freight train was not entered in the computer system that led to the collision in good time.
What consequences can such an accident have in the short and medium term?
Unfortunately, in India I wouldn’t say that the deaths don’t matter, but in India, which has become the world’s largest population this year, the number of accidental deaths every day is significant. It is estimated that there were between 4 and 5 million casualties in India during the Covid epidemic.
On the other hand, this accident increases the pressure on the rail system to modernize itself – which it is already doing – but also to invest a little more in the safety of all.
What are the strengths of the Indian rail network?
It is interesting to compare the overall performance of the Indian railway system with other transportation systems in the world. First the price: you can cover the Delhi-Bombay route (1,433 km) for €3.77. And it is often said that the airplane is the safest means of transport. Well, that is not the case for India. If one compares the global aviation mortality rate (around 160 deaths worldwide in 2022) and sets this figure on the number of passengers carried, then the mortality rate in India is surprisingly ten times lower.
Another advantage is the CO2 emissions. The preference for rail transport is the result of a political decision that has been maintained since independence in 1947. No doubt because of these images of Mahatma Gandhi campaigning in third-class wooden seats. An airplane emits around 150 g of CO2 per passenger and kilometer. The Indian train today has an average emission of 15g per passenger/km, ten times less than the plane. Imagine if the billion Indians chose the whole plane!
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