The recent train accidents in Madhya Pradesh are a chilling reminder of the importance of speedy rescue and medical attention. Survivors spoke of helplessly watching rising flood waters drown fellow passengers trapped inside fallen train coaches. The official death toll in the twin derailments on August 5 stands at 31, but the toll could be over 50, as many are still missing. It could have been lower had rescue teams reached the site quicker, and had been able to extricate survivors. In fact, a significant proportion of accident victims, especially those suffering traumatic injuries, can be saved if bleeding is stopped and circulation stabilised within an hour of the injury. Globally, disaster relief, accident relief and rescue infrastructure are designed to ensure that victims are reached within this ‘golden hour’.
Indian Railways is simply not equipped for this. With 7,000 stations, over 63,000 route-kilometres of tracks and more than 11,000 daily passenger trains, it requires massive resources in order to enable rapid response. These resources are simply not there. The report of the High Level Committee on Disaster Management in the Railways noted that each Accident Relief Medical Van with the Railways had to service, on average, an area covering a radial distance of over 150 km. Typically, relief trains take anything from one to four hours to reach the accident site. With average train lengths increasing in the case of passenger trains, even if a relief van manages to reach, it is often unable to cope with the load. Worse, while the focus on safety and accident avoidance may have increased, relief and rescue preparedness and training continue to be a low priority. A CAG review of disaster management and safety preparedness of the Railways for 2011-12 noted: “In some of the zones in Railways, full scale disaster management exercise was not conducted and the control rooms with communication facilities also remained to be provided. IR was neither able to rapidly access the disaster sites nor could they provide organised rescue and relief during the Golden Hour.” The report further noted that even existing training facilities were underutilised and staff skipped training sessions, indicating a “lackadaisical approach to safety”; it concluded that “though action has been initiated for implementing long term action plan no concrete results are yet visible”.
This state of affairs simply cannot continue. The Railways must radically rethink its approach to disaster management. The infrastructure needs substantial beefing up. Given the complexities of the terrain it operates in, multi-modal capacity, including air- and water-borne delivery, needs to be developed, and its personnel trained and equipped better. This will be a challenge considering the parlous state of its finances. A solution could lie in handing over rescue and relief to civil authorities under the National Disaster Management Agency, leaving it to concentrate post-accidents on track and traffic restoration.