Balasore train tragedy exposes crying need for railway safety upgrade
The terrible train mishap at Odisha’s Balasore has exposed the grim reality that despite some improvement in recent years, the Indian Railways’ safety infrastructure and systems aren’t yet foolproof.
It showed that at least in some sections, facilities are still so decrepit that even the signalling and parallel locking systems, the rudiments of safety features, can fail.
For decades on, the transporter, which practically makes no operational surplus, had been starving the corpus for improving maintenance and replenishment of its existing assets – the depreciation-reserve and safety funds.
