Most train accidents take place in UP and Bihar? What is the Truth?
If you want to understand facts, ignore the headline news items. The biggest killer of Indian Railways is not in UP or Bihar, but in the more ordinary Mumbai suburban railways. They don’t get in the front pages, but they kill more than anything else in the country. According to NCRB stats, it is Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu that lead in accidents – for railways and roadways respectively.
While Bihar gets pulled for every thing bad about our country, it is certainly not the leader in accidents – for either road or rail.
You can also scroll through this list – List of Indian rail accidents – and you are likely to find diverse places where accidents happen. UP has its share – as it is both the state with the largest population and also the closer to the middle of the country – through which a lot of the trains pass through.
This is for 2014. You can get for 2015 and that follows a similar trend.
Given that derailment and level crossing are the predominant causes of railway accidents in India, the issue is mostly with our maintenance of tracks, bridges, signals and the whole infrastructure around it.
Over the years our railways ministers focused more on doling out new trains to their constituencies than really focus on modernizing the tracks.
© Balaji Viswanathan, CEO at Invento.
