Indian Railways Are Improving, But Safety Issues Remain

At least 275 people were killed and hundreds more left injured when a passenger train was diverted onto the wrong tracks in the Odisha state of India on Friday, hitting a stationary freight train and ricocheting into a second passenger train. The derailment is thought to be a result of a signal error, raising questions on the safety of the nation’s railway system as a whole.

The crash is the worst of its kind in India in two decades. As the following chart shows, train accidents are not uncommon in the country, where some 13 million people use the vast network of 64,000 km of track each day. The number of accidents is decreasing, however, with the state-owned company Indian Railways reporting a fall from an accident on average every 0.12 million train kms in 2012 to 0.03 in 2022 - four fold less.

The number of reported fatalities has also fallen. According to the company’s latest report, no passenger deaths were reported in 2020 and 2021, and only 9 people were reported killed in 2022. This contrasts to all other years of the last decade, which ranged from 16 deaths in 2019 to 195 deaths in 2017.

Other sources - which include different metrics - report far higher figures. According to data from the National Crime Records Bureau of India, 2021 saw a total of 16,431 deaths and 1,852 cases of injuries from railway accidents. The majority (67.7 percent) of these were from people falling from trains or from collisions with people on the tracks (12,181 out of 17,993).

While Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has put some $30 billion of investment into the train system, experts say much of it has gone towards redeveloping stations and into new trains rather than necessary upkeep and the improved safety of older models still in use. What’s more, according to the India Railways report, the allotment of funds for track renewal works not only declined from 9607.65 crore (2018-2019) to 7417 crore in 2019-2020 but the funds allocated to track renewal works were “not fully utilized”. Out of 1127 derailments during 2017-21, 289 derailments (26 percent) were linked to track renewals.