Blood on the Tracks

Mumbai’s fatalistic acceptance of suburban railway deaths

At the very least, the suburban train in Mumbai needs to come with a disclaimer like the one on cigarette packs—it can be fatal to those who travel on it. And instead of a photo of cancerous organs, the railway warning can have a photo of the two severed hands of Monica More.

There is something horrifically wrong in a system where a 16-year-old student steps out of the house on an ordinary day and by evening has no hands. In a clip of CCTV footage on Youtube, you can see Monica running along a train to board it at Mumbai’s Ghatkopar station. The train has started moving, but boarding a running train is something almost every passenger in the suburban rail network has done before. Many do it daily. The footage doesn’t show the actual accident, only a sudden rush of people towards the spot where she fell into a pit on the edge of the platform and her hands came under the wheels.

With no ambulances on call, Monica, one hand barely attached with a handkerchief and the other completely severed and wrapped in a piece of cloth, got taken to a hospital in an auto rickshaw. The compensation from the Railways for someone who has lost one’s limbs is Rs 4 lakh. That amount will probably not even cover hospitalisation costs, but Monica will get donations because of the publicity around her case. That only leaves the thousands of others who are similarly injured every year.

An RTI application last year showed that over 11 years up to 2012, more than 23,000 people had been killed on Mumbai’s rail network. Ullas Abraham, a journalist, was one such person. He died a day before Monica’s accident. He was merely going with his family to the suburb of Kalyan when he fell off the train. It was so crowded that his brother-in-law accompanying him did not even notice.

What is frightening is the blind spot the city has developed towards such deaths. The causes have been plain for decades—incredible overcrowding, with compartments packed with numbers three times their capacity; the network being an arm of the Indian Railways controlled by Delhi, and local commuters having little say in its improvement; and the inertia that characterises everything in India. The system has imploded but passengers have no choice; if you have to go to work, there is no alternative.

Bureaucrats and politicians have given up on ever being able to solve the problem. The strategy is to create alternative networks like Metros and monorails, spending tens of thousands of crore; meanwhile, the deaths and accidents keep piling up. If terrorist attacks were to kill 3,500 people a year in one city, there is not a shadow of doubt that the entire machinery of the State would be deployed to address the problem.

For any solution, someone has to first start looking for answers. For example, it might be impossible to lay new tracks because the land for it is just not available. But is there a reason why local trains cannot be turned into double-deckers or triple-deckers? It wouldn’t need impossible infrastructure overhauls. There is, in fact, a double-decker train running on those same tracks, plying long distance to Gujarat. If one train can run on those tracks, it is within the bounds of possibility that many such can. Instead, what is happening now is that trains are expanding in length, from 9-coach to 12-coach to 15-coach, expanding capacity minimally until they are so long that they go all the way from the first station to the next.

There are compromises people are expected to make in urban life. They live in smaller homes, sleep less, eat worse and waste hours going from one place to another. But risking death is not part of the equation. In Mumbai, it has become so for a vast majority. Almost certainly, Monica’s family and Ullas’ family will continue travelling on those same trains in their daily life, with those same odds of death.

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