By Mahesh Vijapurkar
Mansi Gir, a 24-year-old commuter who could not get a foothold on a Mumbai train – colloquially a ‘local’ – earlier this week, slipped between the coach and the Dombivli station platform. Alert passengers pulled the chain and saved his life. The next day, 35-year-old Zubeir Ahmed (35) fell off a local near Mumbra and lost his life.
Not uncommon events, these. Court filings by Western and Central Railways, operators of the far-flung suburban system, as many as 51,000 persons lost their lives on the network in the past two decades. At least a third of them died like Ahmed, others while crossing the tracks to save time or desperate commuters travelling on the roofs.
There was a time when close to 3,500 died a year but it has declined somewhat because the railways provided escalators, lifts, and along the tracks, built barricades to prevent crossing the tracks. The trains which transport people from north to south in the mornings and in the reverse during evenings are somewhat diminished but not enough.
The deaths are a daily risk, especially during the peak hours. Packed worse than sardines, people are forced to lean out at the door, holding on to anything a human could. A slip or leaning too far to hit a signal post means a certain death. The trains are so tightly packed, strap-hanging, and without straps, and an estimated 6 people stand in a square meter during the peak hours.
Imagine travelling for over an hour and a half, smelling the co-passenger’s armpits, or if the standees are in the leg space between two benches, staring at the posterior of a standee all the time. Mind you, Mumbai Metro regions are humid and sweltering. Boarding a train is a circus act, de-training a task but a relief.
Mumbai locals which have a frequency as high as three minutes give a commuter ten seconds or a tad more to confront the arriving passenger and get in. They form an instinctive funnel, grab the pole in the middle of the door, and hurl themselves in. In many cases, a commuter gets jostled and pushed by those behind, into the coach.
The first train ran – from Boribunder, (later Victoria Terminus, now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) – to Thana (now Thane), it was naturally sedate paced, and people had the comfort of some seats vacant. Then they were ’fully occupied’ to ‘crowded’, then ‘overcrowded’. Then an unnamed genius coined “super-dense crowd” which sees a coach carrying five times its capacity.
These trains are a lifeline for the metropolitan region. They take people to work and carry them back. It is an onerous task but improvements are not going to be easy to come by. They carry some seven million every day on as many as 3,214 services and work some 20 hours a day and maintenance downtime means halting trains. Post-COVID, people took to two-wheelers and cars, and the metro system that operates reduced the crowds but not enough.
To reduce crowds, the system increased the number of coaches per rake from eight to 12 to 15. They sped up the trains by improving the signaling, to add to safety, and increased the height of the platforms to reduce the gap between them and the coaches. Now air-conditioned coaches ensure that there are doors to the coaches, but most trains are the old types where the risk of falling off exists.
Apart from the closed AC trains where the doors open and shut only at the stations, there is an idea by which overcrowding can be avoided but there are no takers. It is staggering office hours which would see people travelling at different hours than the usual 10 am and clocking in for work. It could be locality-wise, or office-wise, which means not all commute at the same time.
Central Railway set an example by opting for deferred office hours, but the government has not shown any interest. The idea cropped up during the COVID where social distancing was not possible on the trains though most people worked from home. The peak hours, which are from about 7 am to 11 am and 6 pm to 10 pm, would stretch but at a given time fewer people would commute.
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