India: Top Detective Agency to Investigate Catastrophic Train Wreck

Facts

• On Monday, India's railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recommended that the Central Bureau of Investigation, the country's top detective agency, investigate the three-train collision in the eastern Indian state of Odisha on Friday.¹
• Previously, Vaishnaw had suggested a signal fault — with a "change in electronic interlocking" as the likely cause — led to the deadly crash that killed at least 288 travelers and left over 1K injured in Odisha's Balasore district.²
• Though the cause of the accident is still unclear, local media said a high-speed passenger train first hit a nearby stationary freight train and then derailed onto the adjacent track before it was struck by another train coming from the opposite direction.³
• Rescue efforts reportedly concluded Saturday, with officials saying that all trapped passengers had been recovered. According to the Railway Ministry, work to rebuild the infrastructure has begun.⁴
• Meanwhile, the railway ministry has announced compensation of ₹1M ($12K) to the kin of the deceased, ₹200K ($2.4K) to the grievously wounded, and ₹50K ($600) to passengers who sustained minor injuries.⁵
• India's deadliest and the world's second-biggest rail accident was in 1981, when an overcrowded passenger train plunged off a bridge into a river in the country's eastern state of Bihar, killing an estimated 800 people.⁶

Sources: ¹BBC News (a), ²BBC News (b), ³Al Jazeera, ⁴The Print, ⁵Reuters, and ⁶The Economic Times.

Narratives

• Narrative A, as provided by CNN. Friday's accident, unfortunately, highlights India's worrying railway safety record. In 2021, more than 16K people were killed in nearly 18K railway accidents across the country, mainly from collisions between trains. Countless lives will be lost if PM Narendra Modi's administration continues to launch high-speed trains instead of addressing the issues of aging infrastructure, poor traffic management systems, and overworked loco pilots.
• Narrative B, as provided by Business India. Despite facing a plethora of problems, India's railway network is moving towards modernization, including the face-lifting of over 200 railway stations and the construction of 100K km of new railway tracks over the next 20 years. While the cause of Friday's crash hasn't been ascertained yet, Indian authorities are moving quickly in their investigation and search and rescue, which, for now, is rightly prioritizing victims and their families.