The Monday morning deaths of commuters on the Mumbai suburban network were a not so common, freak accident, substantially due to the gap between two sets of tracks being less than the normal, and on a long curve. Though that technical aspect contributed to the ghastly event, it need not happen. The suburban commuter network operated by the Central and Western Railways, and the government, had a chance to set things right but they let it evaporate.
The moment of reckoning was the COVID times. The locals were restricted for use only by the essential service personnel because in overcrowded coaches, social distancing was impossible.
In normal peak times, between 12 to 16 persons are packed in a square metre of space. This could have been managed by staggering office and business hours so that people left their homes at different hours; the office hours had to be synchronised. Some workplaces could open at 8 am, and another at 9 am, and so on.
The staggering could also be area or suburb wise. I recall my conversations with two senior politicians, Sharad Pawar and Sanjay Raut, canvassing the idea. The former said, “It was a good idea to pursue” and the latter, shot it down, “Social distancing was not possible; it won’t work, but I’ll talk to the chief minister”. Both politicians had heft in the government then, but the idea never took off. Though, implementing it during the COVID would have ensured people’s compliance. The Central Railways was ready, and had asked the city government to agree. But no.
Had that idea been put into practice, the crowding on the trains would have been mitigated, crowds spread thinner per train. They would not have had to precariously stand on their toes on the footboard and hang on precariously to get to work and back but they bet on safely returning home each night despite the odds stacked against them. When the now dead commuters on the footboards of two coaches bumped into each other and plunged to their deaths, do not blame them. Blame the system.
Now the railways have come out with a harebrained plan. These coaches, which are not air-conditioned, would have automatic sliding doors to prevent footboard riding. They would be timed to open and close and commuters could, in the rush, even get crushed for trains only halt for about 30 seconds. That’s when the hoards get off and then their counterparts waiting on equally packed platforms scramble in. And once they are in, they just manage to breathe, smelling the armpit sweat of the strap-hanging co-passenger.
This knee-jerk response is laughable; it cannot mimic the situation with the air-conditioned trains that, given the increased ticket costs, have fewer users than the non-AC locals. The AC commuter trains are therefore less crowded and their doors close because it is not carrying what the railways themselves had coined: “super dense crush loads”; that is, two-and-a-half times the designed carrying capacity. The new design of doors for the cattle-class coaches would have louvres and rooftop ventilation.
The question, however, is not containment but carrying capacity. To the railways’ credit, they have done what they could but have not been able to catch the graph. They added three coaches to several 12-coach commuter trains; shortened the gap between two services, extended the platforms to accommodate them, and after the courts intervened, raised the platform heights so that people scrambling – fighting their way in – did not slip between the coach and platform. They stationed ambulances too but nothing seems to work.
A commuter who said he missed slipping and falling on the tracks in 1975 as a student does not find the situation changed today though the number of trains operated is 3214 now. This could be mainly due to population rise – we do not know the real count because there has been no census since 2011. Users associations say the accident spot where the gap is narrower than elsewhere across the system is known both to the railways and the commuters but it is a daily struggle to get to work for livelihoods.
Three metro lines, slowly built, have not reduced the stress on the railways which continue to carry seven million passengers per day. The east-west connectivity has been improved for road users but that is for cars whose use is only increasing by the day. The municipal bus services, Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport, with the acronym BEST, ironically, is seeing fewer users; the new coastal roads built at great cost do not see buses plying on them. In short, the city’s transport system is a mess. Only some out-of-the-box ideas would work. One idea is to stagger workplace hours.
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