Will this face haunt the Hon’ble Minister?

He was alive when the media reached the site, he was alive until the photographers captured his trauma as he stared out of the window of the mangled coach.

When the coach-cutters, the rescue team and the crane arrived in the Accident Relief Train (ART) Van— almost three hours after the accident — he had bled to death.

Just the previous day, the new chairman of the Railway Board, R K Singh, had held forth at a press conference on what he called the crucial ‘‘golden hour’’. Singh had promised that the Railways’ endeavour would be to ensure medical relief within one hour of any accident since any intervention in that one-hour window saves precious lives.

Tonight, when contacted by The Indian Express, Singh claimed that a medical van came ‘‘within 30 minutes’’ of the accident from Kazipet but by that time Ramakrishna had died. ‘‘He was the last one to die. The priority was to save the injured.’’

However, the medical van isn’t equipped with tools to free trapped passengers—that comes with the Accident Relief Train. Consider these:

• Warangal, where the accident took place, is a big, well-established station.

• Secunderabad, the South Central railways headquarters, is about 140 km from there.

• Accident Relief Train (ART) which should have reached the accident site in just over an hour, took three hours.

• Gas cutters to cut through the iron coaches should have reached within minutes since they are available in all cities—even in motor garages.

Even when gas cutters are risky—given the possibility of burns to passengers—cold-cutting hydraulic equipment is used which works much like a pair of giant scissors.

Also, no one could care less about the recommendations of Justice H R Khanna’s Railway Safety Review Committe. In its first report, way back in 1999, the committee suggested setting up a Disaster Management Institute to focus exclusively on training railway staff on various aspects of rescue and relief.

The committee also asked for replacing of medical vans used by the railways since they were fashioned out of overaged stock. ‘‘As a result they cannot operate at the normal sectional speed. In view of the paramount importance of rushing medical aid to the scene of a disaster, we recommend that the railways should provide self-propelled medical vans in replacement of the existing ones within a span of five years. The cost of such replacement would be approximately Rs 300 crore,’’ the report had stated. This recommendation gathers dust.

Instead, the railway administration had prepared a detailed project after the Howrah Rajdhani derailment in September last, claiming that disaster management was not their responsibility alone and that the civil administration had to share some of it.

Officials in the Railway Board said that the Railway Ministry had already signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Ministry of Defence last month by which nearby Army units would help railways in relief and rescue operations, give medical support and provide helicopters if there is place to land near the site.

That’s little consolation for the mother of Ramakrishna. His death has devastated his mother Saroja and two sisters, Ambika and Lalitha. He had joined the Railways just six months ago following the death of his father, who was also a Railways employee.