Odisha train collision: Solutions that don’t take Railways back to business-as-usual

Source- The post is based on the article “Odisha train collision: Solutions that don’t take Railways back to business-as-usual” published in the “The Indian Express” on 10th June 2023.

Syllabus: GS3- Infrastructure

Relevance- Issues related to safety of railways

News– Recently, there was death of nearly 300 passengers in a train accident at Balasore in Odisha. It has drawn attention to the safety preparedness of the Indian Railways.

What are issues related to operation and maintenance that impacts the safety of railways?

There are issues of highly-congested trunk routes. This generates pressure, both on operations and maintenance.

Excess time for maintenance means slow operations. Focussing on train operations without sufficient time for maintenance means a more failure-prone system.

A system of providing traffic blocks in the passenger timetable already exists. Time is allocated for maintenance along a route, where no trains are scheduled. Earlier, there was discretion in the utilisation of this block period.

The reason for providing discretion was to give operations sufficient room to deal with train delays or to push unscheduled freight trains.

Today, it is still not a complete solution even though blocks are granted as required by the maintenance departments.

There is a lack of mutually agreed annual plan between the maintenance departments and the operations department for coordinated use of the traffic block.

The second issue is directly connected to the recent mishap. There was tampering with the signalling equipment.

It has been suggested that the immense pressure on the field staff at highly congested routes leads to the adoption of shortcuts.

The current practice of a disconnection memo to the station master from the signal maintainer followed by a connection memo is not strictly followed.

The staff is under severe strain to minimise failures and ensure that trains are not detained due to a failure.

The two-agency authorization for opening the relay room, where all the sensitive equipment resides, is violated. Other equipment like junction boxes and point machines are protected with seals but again these can be broken.

What is the way forward to resolve these issues?

There are a couple of measures that could address the systemic constraints.

The basic idea is improvement at systemic level and move away from a reliance on the ingenuity of the individual.

It is possible to make an annual plan of maintenance and map it on the block corridors so that all infrastructure assets are maintained.

There is a need to internalise the paper memo process and the physical locks and seals as part of the electronic system. It needs to develop the necessary software and implement it in the field.