Indore-Patna Express derailment: DRM shifted, 5 rail officials suspended

New Delhi: Fixing responsibility for the derailment of the Indore-Patna Express, in which the death toll rose to 150 on Tuesday, the Railways transferred the divisional railway manager of Jhansi division and suspended five other officials. It also formed a 12-member GRP panel to probe the mishap.

Railway officials said senior divisional mechanical engineer (carriage and wagon) Navaid Talib, divisonal engineer M.K. Mishra, senior section engineer Ambika Prasda Ojha, section engineer Iswar Das and senior section engineer Sushil Kumar Gupta were suspended for dereliction of duty.

Jhansi DRM S.K. Aggarwal was transferred to Ranchi, while the five officials were suspended pending inquiry.

“It was very necessary to take action to fix responsibility. The suspension and transfer orders were issued pending an inquiry conducted by the commissioner of railway safety,” an official said.

Apart from two other probes, the Railways on Tuesday formed a 12-member team of GRP personnel to investigate the derailment. The DSP GRP of Jhansi will head the team.

Experts said that despite recurring accidents which claim hundreds of lives each time, the Railways have studiously ignored the recommendations of parliamentary panels on the safety measures that need to be taken, instead taking knee-jerk measures like suspensions and the forming of committees. “All these accidents are manmade. The entire system is in a danger zone. There is virtually no money to pump in for taking safety measures,” Dinesh Trivedi, a former railway minister, told this newspaper.

He said that in several reports submitted by him, there were recommendations made for safety audits, but no action was taken by the government due to lack of understanding by the Railway Board. In one report, for example, the standing committee on railways said 50 per cent of all rail accidents occur at level crossings and the Railways was not addressing the issue seriously.

The committee was critical of the fact that out of total 31,254 level crossings across India, 12,582 remained unmanned. It blamed the Railways for its “lackadaisical approach” on a very “serious safety issue” and noted that utilisation of funds on safety had fallen short of allocations by upto 40 per cent in all years from 2008-09 to 2012-13.