Rebooting the Railways | Business Line

Rebooting the Railways | Business Line


The Hindu Business Line, November 25

 

Letters

Get on track*

This refers to your editorial “Rebooting the Railways”(November 24). The gross neglect from the government’s side has brought disrepute to most of the public sector organisations including railways. Infrastructure and workforce in Railways get an unsympathetic and raw deal from both the government and the public who benefit from their services. When accidents happen or services do not meet expectations, quite often, employees are blamed and a comparison is drawn to private sector counterparts or worse still, the ‘excellent’ services available abroad.

Immediate priority for the Railways should be to improve the existing services better by:

i)                   Taking measures to reduce the number of accidents. Mumbai suburban locals are death traps which account for scores of daily casualties/fatal injuries. Overload is the main reason and because of livelihood compulsions, no one complaints. This issue must be tackled by staggering office hours, increasing services and providing better and faster alternate arrangements for travel. The Metro or Mono Rails have not changed the situation much.

ii)                 The victims of accidents should get better medical attention and in case of death, survivors should get reasonable compensation fast. As there is no proper identity carried on their persons by passengers, in case of death on the track, even identification becomes a tough job for the authorities.

iii)               A proper ongoing audit should ensure that accidents are not caused by obsolete infrastructure or inefficient men/machines.

iv)               While introduction of superfast trains spending lakhs of crores need not be objected, public has a right to demand safety on the existing tracks and additional investments should not result in the neglect of maintenance of existing services.

M G Warrier, Mumbai
*A slightly edited version of this response appears under Letters in the print edition of The Hindu Business Line, November 25, 2014


 

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