BENGALURU: Investigations into 1,018 ‘consequential’ train accidents in the past eight years —which took 1,940 lives at the rate of 2 deaths every 3 days — revealed that only 4.7% of them were caused by sabotage.
A whopping 44% were caused due to failure of railway staff.
Nearly 3,200 people suffered injuries in these accidents. That only 48 of these accidents (4.7%) were the result of sabotage puts the focus back on the lack of safety measures.
The number of people India loses to train accidents is probably due to the huge shortage of frontline employees belonging to the "safety category" — 1.27 lakh such posts remained vacant at the end of 2016.
The safety employees — trackmen, pointmen, patrolmen, technicians and station masters among others — are directly responsible for safe running of trains. The shortage of the key task force has resulted in overworking of existing staff, almost all working more than 15 hours a day.
Please click here to read more.