Dikhyaa Mohanty 
In the six months before the tragedy in Balasore on Friday, which resulted in at least 288 passenger fatalities and more than 900 injuries in one of India’s deadliest train disasters, the railway officials had been informed on two occasions about defects in the signalling system and weaknesses that cause a derailment. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India identified 24 causes of derailments in a study presented in December. According to the “Derailments in Indian Railways” research, which examined the causes of trains derailing between April 2017 and March 2021, poor track maintenance was a key factor in these mishaps.
The South Western Railway zone’s senior chief operational manager had written to the authorities in February to inform them of “serious flaws” in the signalling system. The official cautioned that if signalling system flaws are not rectified, they might result in “re-occurrence and serious accidents” in a letter written after a train avoided a head-on collision. Two carriages of the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express derailed on Friday at about 7 o’clock in Balasore, Odisha, close to the Bahanaga railway station. The speeding Coromandel Express struck the derailed carriages as they crossed into its route on the next track. Due to this another train also hits with the derailed carriages.
According to the reports, a preliminary inquiry revealed that the signalling system’s malfunction most likely caused the disaster. The green signal for the Coromandel Express to enter the Up Main Line had first been issued, but it was later removed. The inquiry revealed that the express train then entered a loop line where it collided with the goods train, resulting in the multi-train catastrophe.
After the Yesvantpur-Hazrat Nizamuddin Sampark Kranti Express narrowly avoided colliding head-on with a cargo train on February 9, the main chief operating manager of the South Western Railway zone sent a letter to the authorities. The official said that the system has “serious flaws where the dispatch route is changed after a train starts on signals with the correct route appearing in the SMS [signal maintenance system] panel.”
The official said the bug violates the “essence and fundamental principles of interlocking.” Utilizing a configuration of signals, points, and other instruments, interlocking is a device that prevents trains from moving in conflict with one another. In the aforementioned event, the signalling system in Karnataka’s Hosadurga Road station incorrectly authorized Sampark Kranti Express to join the Down line. The official reported that the “alertness of the loco pilot” prevented a collision with a cargo train by stopping the locomotive before it crossed the incorrect line. The anti-train collision system Kavach, according to the Indian Railways, was not accessible on the line where the accident near Balasore took place on Saturday.
In 1,129 inquiry reports of derailment incidents between April 2017 and March 2021, it was determined through analysis that 171 occurrences were related to “track maintenance” and 156 to “deviation of track parameters beyond permissible limits.” The entire spending on Priority-I works from the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh decreased from 81.55% in 2017–18 to 73.76% in 2019–20, according to the Comptroller and Auditor General report. According to the railway ministry, the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh, a reserve fund for rail safety, would get an allotment of Rs 1 lakh crore over five years beginning in 2017–18.
The CAG report also revealed a decrease in the amount of money allocated for track renewal, from Rs 9,607.65 crore in 2018–19 to Rs 7,417 crore in 2019–20. Even the allocated money wasn’t used entirely, according to the investigation. According to the CAG, the inquiry reports for 63% of the derailment incidents were not filed in the allotted period, and in 49% of those cases, the authorities took longer than expected to approve the findings.
