As India Prepares For Bullet Train, 9 Derailments in 27 Days Reveal Railway Safety Crisis

In the first six months of 2017, 29 train accidents were reported of which 20 were due to derailments, according to a Parliamentary question in Lok Sabha on July 19, 2017.

News18.comUpdated:September 15, 2017,

New Delhi: On the day Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe laid the foundation stone for a Rs-1,10,000-crore ($17 billion) bullet train, the Jammu Tawi-New Delhi Rajdhani Express jumped the tracks at New Delhi station, the ninth derailment in 27 days, a consequence of growing traffic, falling safety standards and under investment, an analysis by IndiaSpend has revealed.

This is a rate of one derailment every third day.

Indian Railways has had the most derailments in a decade in 2016-17: 78 derailments with 193 people dead, the website had reported in August. Although accidents in general have fallen over 10 years, from 194 in 2007-08 to 104 in 2016-17, derailments have risen over this period, IndiaSpend reported.

In the first six months of 2017, 29 train accidents were reported of which 20 were due to derailments, according to a Parliamentary question in Lok Sabha on July 19, 2017.

Derailment was the second-leading reason for train accidents and casualties between 2003-04 and 2015-16, according to the Twelfth Report of the Standing Committee on Railways on ‘Safety and Security in Railways’ presented in the Lok Sabha in 2016. The leading reasons for accidents was human error.

One of the cause for derailments is the lag in addressing what are technically called “defects in the track or rolling stock”.