An everyday brush with disaster on Mumbai’s crowded railway
You gain a certain perspective on India’s safety challenges from lying on a Mumbai railway platform, under a surging crowd, while a moving train cuts into your lower leg.
As my train approached Bandra station last Monday evening, the commuters tightly packed around me put away their phones and braced as though for impact.
Almost as soon as the platform began flashing past outside the open doorway, people started jumping out. The logic behind their risky manoeuvre soon became clear when a crowd charged forward, gripping the doorway’s edge as they forced their way into the carriage.
Abandoning any hope of disembarking after the train stopped, I lowered my head and pushed between two writhing bodies. Out of nowhere came a fist in my right eye — and suddenly I was on my back with my left foot under the edge of the still-rolling carriage.
Three days later, sitting opposite me on the floor of his flat above a noisy gold bazaar, Mr Samir Zaveri pondered my bloodshot eye and stitched-up shin and shook his head at my good fortune.
On a table between us was a sheath of documents detailing the casualties on Mumbai’s trains in recent years — police figures obtained by Mr Zaveri under India’s Right to Information Act. The statistics are a grim testament to the terrible safety record of the country’s transport network — even as this rising power pursues grand projects such as a US$17 billion (S$23.1 billion) high-speed rail link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad.
Mumbai’s trains are often described as the city’s “lifeline”, carrying seven million passengers a day — largely people from the sprawling suburbs who work in offices on the narrow peninsula of old Bombay. Yet last year alone, 3,202 people were killed on the system, while a further 3,363 suffered amputations or other serious injuries.
About a third of these casualties result from people walking over train tracks in the absence of boundary walls. Most others, Mr Zaveri says, stem from overcrowding on a network that packs about 5,560 passengers into each 12-car train in peak hours, against a rated safe capacity of 3,522.
Mr Zaveri lost both legs aged 17 after slipping on the track. While sitting in a disabled carriage in 2006, looking around at others whose limbs were lost on the railways, he decided to act.
The result was a series of court petitions, arguing that the railway authorities were breaching their constitutional duty to protect their passengers’ lives. He has taken his campaign as far as the Supreme Court, winning a number of victories to force improvements such as ambulances and emergency treatment areas at stations.
He may soon witness a limited step towards meeting a larger demand: Eliminating the open carriages from which 2,155 people fell last year to death or major injury. The rail authority is planning to spend US$450 million on new carriages with automatic doors, which will enter service some time after 2020.
Yet these will account for only a third of the network’s fleet, and most of the existing open carriages are slated to stay in service for another 25 years. Mr Prabhat Ranjan, the rail authority’s spokesman, told me of other improvements made, including bridges to stop people running across tracks.
I asked him whether much greater investment in safety was not justified, given the huge continuing loss of life. “All that is possible has already been done,” he replied. “The volume is so much that the priority is to carry large numbers of people.”
From now on, I will be making more use of the city’s congested roads. But millions of Mumbaikars will continue to fight their way on to trains whose perils are universally familiar.
In an English coaching session with teachers in the slum district of Dharavi, I asked if anyone had lost friends or relatives on the trains. Sure enough, one of the five young people shared the story of his cousin’s death two months before, nearly decapitated by a signal while hanging from the doorway of carriage.
Such horrific deaths attract strikingly little public outrage, beyond Mr Zaveri and a small number of other activists.
Yet when I asked what would mark the end of his campaign, he answered brusquely. “Zero,” he said, already reaching for a new piece of evidence to thrust before me.
“Zero deaths.” THE FINANCIAL TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Simon Mundy is Mumbai correspondent for the Financial Times.
