When green spells danger

And now, if you'd just look out to your left, you too will say the Indian railway runs at God's mercy,quot; hollered the diesel-assistan...

And now, if you8217;d just look out to your left, you too will say the Indian railway runs at God8217;s mercy,quot; hollered the diesel-assistant-cum-navigator without even once taking his eyes off the tracks undulating ahead against Rajasthan8217;s inky-dark countryside. A 100 kmph gale was blasting in through the pane-less windows, making conversation all but impossible in the explosive din generated by the locomotive8217;s 4500 HP engines to keep the nine-coach 2957 Down Swarna Jayanti Rajdhani Express hurtling through an unending mesh of signal-towers and luminous signboards sporting coded instructions.

I didn8217;t need much convincing any more that this iron horse indeed packed a punch equivalent to no less than 4,500 equestrians and equestriennes cantering in tandem. How on earth did the crew converse aboard those 8000 HP locomotives they harness to haul goods trains, I wondered, positioning myself on one-half of the precarious perch I was obliged to share with him. The promised sight rushed past in a flash, but not beforeI8217;d taken in the gist of the matter. Curled in a foetal position around a small bonfire was a mummified human figure. A few inches away was a regulation lantern that justifies the existence of half the railways8217; immense manpower. It flashed green, of course, indicating the mandatory all-clear to any and all locomotives that happened to be hurtling past. Too bad if a saboteur had chosen this section of the rail tracks tonight to unambiguously express his strong dissent with the policy-makers at New Delhi.

Damn these patrolman, exclaimed the grizzly, old driver from the other side of the dimly-lit locomotive. quot;They keep sleeping and blame us drivers if there8217;s an accident,quot; he added, his eyes fixed ahead even as his hands worked a lever here and a switch there. It had only been four-odd hours since he had reluctantly let me aboard his locomotive after briefly seeking a benediction from the heavens with some help from incense sticks, but I8217;d already seen enough to understand why one of the biggest railnetworks in the world harboured one of the lowest safety rating.

The trouble, quite clearly, lay with the usual suspects: hierarchical ego conflicts. So efficient was the railway traffic management, it seemed, at buck-passing that even after dozens of wrecked trains and thousands dead in the last few decades, the railways8217; core staff of gate-men, patrolmen, guards and station masters still get away with an idyllic life-style that doesn8217;t include taking their allotted tasks seriously.

If this was the treatment meted out to a Rajdhani, one could see why trains routinely get derailed without raising a single pair of eyebrows. True, Indian society is a fatalistic one, but at the heart of this criminal negligence lies a deeper malady: population. So teeming is this country with human life of all sorts that the demise of a few hundred or two goes down as mere statistical data to feed news copy.

Till date, for instance, the railways8217; locomotive department8217;s personnel are categorised as illiterates, and paid assuch, though it8217;s more the obvious that anyone expected to decipher complicated instructions and maintain a minute-to-minute log in English can hardly be illiterate. In fact, this driver happened to be a matriculate while his assistant was a B.Ed.!Their remuneration and promotional prospects appear to be proportionally dismal. After a service of 34 long years, the driver took home about Rs 8,000, which is lower than a starting salary for a majority of professionally trained job-seekers. And they were denied such basic courtesies as an advance reservation for their kin when they availed of the free journey time all railway employees are entitled to in varying degrees of comfort. And when they got off at their destination, all they could count on was a cot at some over-crowded rest room that accommodated all and sundry irrespective of rank or job profile. Is that the sort of incentive they could look forward to as they guided their trains across thousand of miles as per their training and instinct?