That s-word again

Sabotage. Railway Minister Nitish Kumar had mouthed the word almost immediately after the September 9 derailment of the Howrah-New Delhi Rajdhani. Chairman of the Railway Board I.I.M.S. Rana echoed the minister just a few hours later. Now we have Mahesh Chand, commissioner of railway safety (CRS, eastern circle), arriving at the same conclusion in a preliminary inquiry report. The final report should be out by the end of the year. Whether this conclusion will help make rail travel in India more safe is unlikely, since the CRS doesn’t back up its sensational finding with any information about who could be held responsible for the crime or how they could have perpetrated it with apparent ease on an extremely busy track.

It would be nothing short of tragic if the sabotage finding becomes just a convenient excuse for the railways to shrug off all responsibility for the mishap and carry on regardless. A callous, we-are-not-responsible approach would, indeed, pave the way for more disasters of the Rafiqganj kind. After all, every accident is an occasion to make the system more fail-safe but this can only happen if the lessons it teaches us are, first, understood and then assimilated within the system. Therefore, if indeed the signal from the Rafiqganj crash site is that this was a case of sabotage, we would still like to know where the system failed, and whether the well defined procedures to ensure the safety of railway tracks in sensitive zones were adhered to. Also, it would be unwise to completely overlook the other possible causes for such an accident, including poorly maintained bridges and track subsidence under monsoon conditions known to be common in this sector.

A last aspect needs highlighting here. The autonomy of the inquiry process must be jealously guarded. It is always easier for authorities charged with this responsibility to go along with the dominant viewpoint, especially if the union railway minister himself had pronounced it. Although, technically, the CRS is attached to the ministry of civil aviation, the office is still not sufficiently independent. There is a case, therefore, to be made for the setting up of a constitutional authority empowered to inquire into accidents of this kind on a completely autonomous basis.