Near Zero Accidents Regime: Can Indian Railways do it?

Safety on Indian Railways (IR) comes to the fore with frenetic TV and media debates, narratives, and counter-narratives every time there is a major mishap. But as the national attention span rivals that of a goldfish, the issue fades as soon as the headlines move on. Fortunately, barring the unfortunate stampede at New Delhi Railway Station on February 15, there has been a respite for months. This, therefore, is the time to rise above the din and take a hard look at railway safety—before another disaster rudely reminds us.

Whenever railway safety becomes a hot topic, critics claim that IR prioritizes optics over safety, leading to a rise in accidents, while the government alleges nefarious activities of sabotage by external enemies. Both narratives miss the mark. The number of accidents has actually declined, but the sabotage theory, fuelled by cases of occasional track obstructions, was never convincing as most cases were rather trivial, even childish, to cause a derailment. I have always maintained that while agencies like the NIA investigate, jumping to conclusions only spreads panic. Often, what is labeled as terror turns out to be a case of mischief or simple criminality, like the two infamous cases in Gujarat and MP where railway staff faked incidents to settle personal scores.

A couple of recent news items on railway safety slipped under the radar. First, the Commissioner of Railway Safety (CRS), NE Railway, held IR's engineering department responsible for the derailment of the Chandigarh-Dibrugarh Express in Gonda on July 18, 2024, which claimed four lives. IR had initially blamed suspected sabotage, despite there being no credible signs of it. This coupled with the fact that fact that multiple investigations, including by the NIA, have failed to unearth a sabotage angle in various cases which they were supposed to investigate on priority, should be a wake-up call. IR should eschew jumping the gun, and instead of crying wolf on the phantom of anti-national activities and pointing at the convenient scapegoat of sabotage, IR must focus on meaningful corrective action to address the real causes of accidents.

Second, while presenting the Railways (Amendment) Bill 2024 in the Upper House, Railway Minister Vaishnaw proudly highlighted an annual investment of over Rs 1 lakh crore in safety measures and a sharp drop in the accident rate—from 171 incidents a decade ago to just 30 now. The opposition may cry foul, but the reality is clear: the trend of declining accidents is a reality. Successive administrations, not merely the present one,  have worked for years on eliminating unmanned level crossings, ramping up track maintenance, improving signaling, and phasing out outdated coaches for safer LHB models. To this government's credit, capital expenditure in these areas has been massively ramped up since 2014, accelerating improvements.

Pumping money in track, signaling, and rolling stock works will undoubtedly enhance safety incrementally, but quantum improvements require sharper focus. Consider the Kavach signaling system. Parliament was informed that IR has been refining, upgrading, and certifying Kavach since 2016, culminating in the approval of Version 4 in July 2024. It was further announced that 1,5000 km of track will be equipped with Kavach in the next five years. What wasn’t mentioned is that despite all the grand announcements, not a single kilometer has been added to the existing 1,448 km of Kavach territory in Secunderabad area (also North Central Railway?) since its much-hyped trial in full media presence more than three years ago. Instead, IR latched onto the CRS recommendation after the Vizianagaram accident (October 29, 2023) to install Kavach in locomotives even in non-Kavach territory. This move, while offering limited safety benefits, is no substitute for full deployment. And yet, IR is pushing ahead at breakneck speed with an Rs 8,000 crore plan for locomotive installations while the more crucial infrastructure—telecom towers, control panels, optical fibre cables, and RFID tags—crawls along on the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah corridors. Worse, even in the so-called Kavach territory of South Central Railway, actual usage remains the exception rather than the rule.

Another major piece of the railway safety puzzle is Artificial Intelligence. While India lags in building its own foundational AI model, can it leapfrog the world in using AI for rail safety? IR dabbles with AI for CCTV surveillance, passenger amenities, and reservations, but its adoption of AI for safety remains bafflingly absent. Instead of merely conducting post-mortem analyses of accidents, AI should be leveraged for real-time actionable alerts. Given the sheer volume of digital data from station loggers and locomotive microprocessors, manual collation and analysis is humanly impossible. AI could seamlessly sift through this ocean of data, flagging anomalies and critical issues for top railway management daily. The failure to harness AI is not just a technological lag; it is a safety blunder waiting to explode.

It is time to focus on these two areas if IR is to move towards a near-zero accident record. Forgetting what the Bard said through Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, “Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.”, it is required to heed the fellow Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor, “...better three hours too soon than a minute too late...”. 

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Do read my previous blog too:

https://anindecisiveindian.blogspot.com/2024/09/rerouting-safety-on-indian-railways.html