Editorial: Overhaul railway safety systems

The tragic death of 18 people in a stampede at the New Delhi Railway Station on Saturday, calls for a review and overhaul of crowd management and safety systems across railway stations in India. As the most popular long-distance carrier in India, the Railways is no stranger to crowd surges. But if it was caught napping last week, it can only mean that its systems have become obsolete and that there is an urgent need to modernise every process relating to safety.

At least two of the triggers for Saturday night’s stampede point to this pressing need. Even after it was clear that the platforms were filled to capacity with pilgrims waiting to get into any train headed to the Maha Kumbh mela in Prayagraaj, the sale of tickets for general class travel continued. It has been reported that more tickets than normal were issued that evening. Also, many ticketless passengers added to the crush as all checking processes were overwhelmed due to the festive season rush. The other trigger was the sudden announcement of a change of platform for one of the Kumbh Mela special trains, which triggered a passenger rush from one platform to another through a narrow staircase.

Both these triggers arose from systemic flaws and point to lax functioning. Obviously, general class ticketing is not well-calibrated to mitigate crowd density on the platforms, and rules are suspended when there is festival rush. Similarly, the hasty announcement that triggered inter-platform movement points to poor communication practices that pay heed only to the content of announcements rather than potential outcomes as well.

These are just two aspects of passenger safety that should be addressed by the inquiry. Hopefully it will bring home the need for the Railway Ministry to correct its skewed modernisation priorities. Ashwini Vaishnav needs to shift his focus from photogenic trains and swanky railway stations to substantial issues such as track safety, signalling technology and in-station systems.

Crowd analytics is a solution worthy of investment. It can provide predictive guidance to station managements to handle crowd surges at festival times and weekends. Analytics-guided ticketing and security protocols would have alerted the management well in time to avert the disaster on Saturday. The occurrence of two Kumbh Mela related stampedes in less than three weeks, one at the mela venue in Prayagraaj and the other at the New Delhi Railway Station, suggests the need for wider stakeholder coordination when a mega crowd event is planned. Did the UP government agencies conducting the Mela consult multiple railway zones carrying pilgrims to the event? Did the railway authorities define their role only as a carrier of passengers to the event but not as a regulator of traffic to a crush-prone site?

Festival rush is a common phenomenon for all transport systems in India. Safety concerns can be easily alleviated if all of them were coordinated at peak hours, with one system easing the load on the others. Another area that needs attention from a safety perspective is platform and inter-platform bridge design. Periodic stampedes on staircases and bridges, including Saturday’s tragedy, clearly suggest that these are not designed for the way we use them. Not only do we need better monitoring of these structures, there needs to be a separation of up and down movement. These are just a few inputs that go into safe travel and a vast and widely flung organisation like the Indian Railways cannot afford to consider them in isolation.