India’s surging rail investment fails to avert disaster

On Saturday, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was scheduled to flag off via video hookup the first departure of a new Vande Bharat (“Salute to India”) express train service linking the western state of Goa to the commercial capital Mumbai.

However, the launch was called off following India’s worst rail disaster in decades, a three-train accident that killed at least 275 people and injured hundreds more in the eastern state of Odisha on Friday.

The Goa-Mumbai express, the 19th in a prestige fleet of Vande Bharat services with maximum speeds of 160km/h, is one sign of surging investment and improving standards in one of the world’s biggest railway systems since Modi took office in 2014.

But as rescuers in Odisha extracted the dead and injured from mangled carriages, Friday’s disaster evoked the darker past of a system previously beset by under-investment in infrastructure, maintenance and rolling stock.

The length of electrified railway lines in India has more than doubled since 2014, from 21,000km to more than 50,000km in 2022. The proportion of electrified lines reached 65.8 per cent in 2021, higher than France’s 60.3 per cent and the UK’s 38 per cent.

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Ashwini Vaishnaw, the railways minister and a Modi ally known for handing out miniature Vande Bharat train models at meetings, had been due to attend the inauguration of the new express at Goa’s Madgaon station. Instead, he travelled on Friday night to the scene of the disaster to oversee rescue efforts.

Vaishnaw said on Sunday that the government’s early findings suggested the Odisha accident was the result of a signalling error caused by a failure of the “electronic interlocking” system, which helps to regulate the movement of trains between tracks.

He called on India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, the country’s top law enforcement agency, to open a criminal probe into the accident.

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The disaster was India’s deadliest railway accident since 1999, when almost 300 people were killed in a crash in West Bengal.

Government safety data shows India has been reducing the number of train accidents since 1980. Accidents per million kilometres travelled fell to 0.05 in 2019, down from 2.2 in 1980 and 5.5 in 1961. 

But Modi’s opponents seized on the disaster to accuse the government of trying to deflect attention from its failure to invest in safety mechanisms.

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Mallikarjun Kharge, president of the Indian National Congress, the largest opposition party, wrote to Modi on Monday alleging that “the people in charge — your goodself and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw — do not want to admit that there are problems”.

“The CBI, or any other law enforcement agency, cannot fix accountability for technical, institutional and political failures,” he added.

Official data shows India has been investing record amounts in its railway network — including on safety — in the years since Modi took office.

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“Since the 1990s and 2000s as the Indian economy has grown more steadily, Indian budgets have looked much more healthy and there has been more money to spend on railroads,” said Partha Mukhopadhyay, senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

India’s budget for the 2023-24 financial year earmarked Rs2.4tn ($29bn) for railway capital investment, 50 per cent more than last year.

However, experts have in some cases questioned whether New Delhi is investing in the right places and have suggested that improvement in the capacity of railway staff has not kept pace.

Capital investment data shows a large and persistent gap between what India spends on new lines and rolling stock and what it invests in maintaining existing lines and renewing tracks.

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A new safety system launched last year to prevent collisions had not yet been introduced in the location where Friday’s accident happened. 

Overall railway-related deaths in the world’s most populous country remain staggering. According to data provided by Indian states and territories, more than 16,000 people died in falls from trains, accidents on tracks or other causes in 2021 — although only about 100 of these perished in derailments or collisions.

Swapnil Garg, a former railway official now at the Indian Institute of Management in Indore, said Friday’s accident highlighted defects that remained embedded in India’s railway system despite the government’s investment in infrastructure and technology.

One of the biggest concerns, he said, was that many railway personnel responsible for safety were chronically overstretched, underqualified and disillusioned.

“This is a transition phase for Indian Railways,” Garg said. “As fast as we’re moving on the technical side — spending money, building new infrastructure — the human resource side is where we’re lacking.”