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Journalism of Courage
Stampedes, like the one that claimed five lives in the Capital last week, provides glimpses of future shock. It should provoke not just the Indian Railways, but civil society, to think ahead about ways to prevent such tragedies. In the latest instance, the swelling crowd was caused by two major festivals — Chhath puja and Id — coming together. The crowds were for the most part made up of people wishing to climb on board the Bihar-bound Jansadharan Express, with its cheaper tickets and unreserved compartments. It is amazing that while the Railways seemed to have perceived the need to increase the number of trains to meet the festival rush, it did not display the requisite foresight to make suitable arrangements for crowd management. If additional police forces could have been deployed after the tragedy, why couldn’t they have been requisitioned earlier? Would the authorities care to explain?
It is also urgently necessary to reduce the size of crowds on railway platforms through better planning. The daily movement of nearly three-quarters of a million people at New Delhi railway station, for instance, clearly demands such an intervention. There are numerous related questions. Should an unlimited number of tickets be issued, even for unreserved trains, without any thought to the actual number of passengers that can be accommodated in a particular train? Should so many trains be allowed to terminate and begin from one particular station? Cannot a major proportion of our passenger trains, especially the additional ones run on special occasions, start and terminate at the fringes of the metropolis rather than at its heart? Cannot connecting urban trains then ferry these passengers to different locations? Also, are there not ways to limit the number of non-passengers on platforms given the peculiarly Indian penchant of dozens of relatives turning up to bid farewell to a single passenger (clearly the platform ticket is no longer enough of a disincentive)? At any given time, there are hundreds of people spread out on our platforms, further burdening the already over-stretched infrastructure.
We need to answer these questions and think about ways to modernise, rationalise and reform railway passenger facilities and management if we are to be adequately prepared for the future. True, incidents like the one that occurred in New Delhi are the result of a peculiar combination of factors which is not always the case. But given growing urbanisation, we need to prepare for the worst in order to cope efficiently with the normal. Indeed, reforming itself could well be the biggest challenge facing the Indian Railways in the future.
