I love writing on railways precisely because I am what I am today substantially due to what Indian Railways made me in my formative years. In 2014, when Guru Rail called me up to give Guru Dakshina by co-opting me to the E. Sreedharan Committee, I ran across the country for months with gunny bags full of reports to reform railways since Robertson Committee 1903 to distil the wisdom and write the report of the Committee. Sreedharan committee recommended freeing the Railway Board from all commercial decision-making, including tenders to enable it to concentrate on the big picture job of policy making, inspection and monitoring Zonal Railways.
Unfortunately, here am I, again doing what sends shivers down to my marrows, writing about another avoidable railway accident, that too second time in the same month and third time in six months. I detest writing on railway accidents, it deeply saddens and torments me, but I write because I cannot be at peace with my derailed alma mater going down the drain, whether due to complete apathy to incidents or “chalta hai attitude” is a matter of detail.
No More Dithering- Set up Rail Safety Authority
Merely 18 days back, on October 13, in my piece opinion piece on the Bihar train accident, I wrote, “Any major accident must be a wake-up call for the Railway Board, who must get to the root cause analysis and take action to punish those found guilty. It should get out of its track record of fixing responsibility at the lowest possible level of officials.”
The piece deliberated in detail as to what was derailing the safety of railways, and it also reiterated the thirteen-year-old nostrum of immediately setting up fully empowered and independent rail safety architecture in the form of the Rail Safety Authority (RSA) as recommended by high high-powered committee on Railway Safety, headed by noted scientist Dr. Anil Kakodkar.
The Latest Accident is Bizarre
The latest accident in which two passenger trains, one en route to Rayagada and the other headed to Visakhapatnam, collided with each other in Andhra Pradesh’s Vizianagaram district on Sunday, leaving mangled coaches gone turtle and at least 14 dead and more than 53 injured is bizarre, totally indefensible and avoidable. A routine inquiry of five junior officers has arrived at the pedestrian reason “human error”. It is no rocket science to decipher that most railway accidents are due to human errors and still railways continue to clear the accident site of one accident and wait for the next to happen.
Accidents will Not Stop on Their Own
Way back in 1987, playing Golf at Railway Golf Club, Hubli in Karnataka, one Divisional Railway Manager of Southern Railway told me a story. He got perturbed because, in his first three months as DRM, there were three accidents in his division (minor or major), but towards the end of the term he was relieved as accidents had even out over a period and the track record of all divisions of Southern Railway was equally bad during that time.
Without bothering about the veracity or otherwise of the above story, it gives a painful message. A DRM was happy that an accident also happened in other divisions and not only in his division and none of the divisions learned any major lesson or applied it from the accident from other divisions or their own.
More than four decades have gone by. Accidents have continued to happen in Indian Railways (IR), sometimes killing in single digits, often in dozens and not infrequently in hundreds. At least two conscientious railway ministers, indomitable Lal Bahadur Shashtri and gentleman Suresh Prabhu abdicated or lost their jobs owing to railway accidents, but to the best of my knowledge, no General Manager or Divisional Railway Manager has been sacked irrespective of the severity of the accident.
It is a myth that the transfer of GM or DRM, suspension of a branch officer and punishment to a junior staff will weed out accidents. The only thing which can stop accidents is a complete stop-loss order, not only for accidents but “zero tolerance” to even minor safety infringements and incidents that could have become accidents.
Buck Stops at Railway Board
When it comes to zero tolerance of incidents and infringements to safety, the buck stops at the mandarins of Rail Bhawan. What we come to know of consequential accidents with loss of life of human life is the tip of the iceberg. The root causes of such accidents are the criminal offence of Zones and Divisions which instead of honestly reporting, analysing and trying to stop incidents and safety infringements are busy burying them under the carpet. I am going to provide a simple solution, but before that, I do a small scenario-building.
All is Well, All are Happy
Forget the empowered and independent Rail Safety Authority, the railway board has a toothless safety monitoring setup and zones and divisions have a vested interest in not reporting safety infringements and incidents. Railways is an organisation where punctuality meetings are sacrosanct and safety meetings are boring incidental. Nonetheless, everywhere (in Divisions, Zonal Head Office and Railway Board) safety is monitored daily in meetings. And only minor, routine and filtered issues are discussed. No division or zone has the integrity to bring out real incidents or safety infringements up for discussion. The fiefdom of departmental officers decides which incident will be reported. Safety meetings are most mundane, tea, coffee, biscuits and cashew nuts are served, and meetings end. All is well and all are happy.
Railway Deadwoods are Safety Officers
At the root of the lack of safety orientation in railways is an inconvenient truth – insufficient safety organisation and dead woods as safety officers. I say it with full conviction of a person who has been a keen student of Indian Railways for four decades initially as an insider outsider and later as an outsider insider.
In an era of complete computerisation, accounts office in even small division like Mughalsarai (where I was posted) has not less than 200 people. Compared to that, Konkan Railway which is of the size of Solapur division has no more than 25 person accounts office. Contrarily I have yet to see a well-endowed safety office even of 25 competent persons in a division.
The root cause is that safety in IR is incidental, or else divisions and zone safety organisations would not have been filled with rail deadwood. Till safety was part of the transportation department, the worst traffic officers were posted as traffic costing officers under Financial Advisor and the second worst landed as safety officers. Once safety became the ex-cadre department in zones and divisions, only those officers are posted in safety who are unwanted in their own departments. There is another type of Chief Safety Officer in Zones, those whose only interest is not leaving the city. Within the IR, there is an All-India Delhi Service (AIDS), and every Zonal Railway headquarters has its own equivalent. I am reminded today of what one retiring Chief Safety Officer in Secunderabad told in his farewell function in 1987 – “I entered my quarter as Assistant Operating Superintendent, I am happy to retire from the same quarter.”
My Simple Nostrum
A Railway Minister under the first term of the Narendra Modi government once said famously in his railway budget speech in parliament, “The railway board has become unwieldy.”
Today, despite most commercial functions including tenders having been shifted away from the railway board to zonal railways, after the acceptance of the E Sreedharan Committee report, the railway board continues to be unwieldy. It is time to transfer 88 best Junior Administrative Grade board officers to 18 zones and 70 divisions. They will continue to be railway board officers and will man the new nodes of CRIS in divisions and headquarters and will feed reports without filtering on a real-time basis, all incidents and safety infringements to a dedicated CRIS node in the Railway Board under the Director General Safety. Let people be hanged figuratively for every small or big incident or safety infringement. Trust me, accidents will vanish. And it will not be the overreach of the Railway Board.
Monitoring is its bonafide function and even the Prime Minister’s Office I believe has an extension office in the Railway Board. Let the focus of safety change from passive reporting by divisions and zones to active real-time nanosecond effective monitoring by railway board using the powerful tool of CRIS and instant connectivity.
Akhileshwar Sahay is a Multidisciplinary Thought Leader with Action Bias and India-Based International Impact Consultant. An acknowledged railway expert, he is an ex-Indian Railway Officer. During 2014-2015, he was co-opted by the Railway Board to the One-Man E. Sreedharan Committee. He works as President Advisory Services of Consulting Company, BARSYL. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
Comments
0 comment