RailEnquiry

Quiz: Who said: “Resign? Why should I? I am not in the least bothered by all this.”

If you have answered Mukul Roy, you have understood our railway minister completely.

Ever since Mukul Roy took over as minister towards the end of March, we have witnessed not less than five fires involving passenger trains, making it an average of slightly more than one fire a month on board our trains. It is perplexing. Consider: An empty air-conditioned coach catches fire accidentally at Jodhpur on July 13; there is a blaze in a brake van in the Chennai-Alleppey Express on June 28 at Erode, luckily no casualty; three bogies of a local train are destroyed by fire at Falaknuma station in Hyderabad; two air-conditioned coaches of the Howrah-Dehradun Express catch fire at Giridih, Jharkand, killing seven on November 22 last year; on one day—November 13 last year—fires break out in two empty trains, one in Chennai and another in Hyderabad; on April 18, 2011, fire engulfs four coaches of the Mumbai-Delhi Rajdhani at Ratlam; a few days before that on March 7, 2011, there is a blaze in the Manoharabad-Secundrabad suburban train. There was a fire on Goutami Express when its S-9 bogey got burnt taking the lives of 32 people in the process; this was in August 2008. There have been as many as 34 in the last six years in which over 70 people have died. There have been fires in our goods trains as well. I am not counting the other accidents either.

Can there be any justifiable reason why so many of our trains catch fire all the time? Our latest railway minister, who has not been touched in the reshuffle, it must be noted, hinted at sabotage even before we could absorb the full dimensions of what happened in the S-11 coach of the Tamil Nadu Express. Media pointed out that he continued to remain in Kolkata even a full 12 hours after the fire. When asked what he was doing in Kolkata when he should have been at Nellore, he pointed to the poor connectivity between Kolkata and Nellore. This column has a suggestion: considering the frequency of the fires that our trains witness and the tendency of the Trinamool railway ministers to hang around in Kolkata all the time instead of Delhi, it would be wise to station an aircraft for the exclusive use of our Trinamool railway ministers, for them to airdash, as it were, to the spots where such fires break out.

Not that it would make the conflagrations any easier to understand or that it will reduce the alarming frequency with which they occur but it will help the railway minister to stage a more convincing/timely entrance at the hospitals where survivors and relatives languish after such fires. The minister, has for good measure, ordered a probe into the Tamil Nadu Express fire. Indeed, it is the norm to order probes. I only wonder what happens once a railway fire probe committee submits its report. It would be logical to assume that the Indian Railways would have changed as a result of implementation of so many fire reports that surely must be there. Yet it hasn’t. What conclusion can we draw from this? A conclusion that explains why our Railway Minister Mukul Roy, or any of his predecessors for that matter, have not been the least bothered by all this, of course.