2.6 lakh people died in rail accidents in India in past 10 yrs
Nikhil Rampal3 June, 2023 10:19 pm IST
New Delhi: A collision involving three trains in Odisha’s Balasore Friday claimed 288 lives and left over 900 people wounded in what’s being considered one of India’s biggest railway accidents.
The incident has once again sparked conversations about the safety measures taken by the Indian Railways. A look at the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) records shows that roughly 2.6 lakh people have lost their lives in train accidents in the past 10 years.
The NCRB is an Indian government agency responsible for collecting and analysing crime data in India.
What’s significant, however, is that a vast majority of the railway accident deaths were caused, not by incidents such as the one witnessed Friday, but because of people either falling off trains or getting run over by them — the records show that such incidents accounted for as much as 70 per cent of railway accident deaths between 2017-21.
Here’s a quick look at what data has to say about railway accidents in the past 10 years.
Also Read: Odisha train accident: Official flagged ‘serious flaws in signalling system’ in February
What data shows — accident trajectory
The NCRB classifies railway accident deaths in five categories — derailments, collisions, explosions/fires, people falling from trains or trains colliding with people on tracks, and ‘other causes’.According to the NCRB’s report on ‘Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India’, in 2011, India lost around 25,872 people to railway accidents. This number rose to 27,000 in 2012 and 27,765 in 2013, and fell to around 25,000 people in 2014.
This graph gradually came down further from 2017 — that year, such deaths came down to 24,000 and hovered around that figure till 2019 (when it was 24,619).
As expected, the most dramatic fall came in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected passenger train services — that year, railway accident deaths came down to about 11,968.
This figure went up steeply by 27 per cent to 16,431 in 2021, although it was still significantly lower than the pre-pandemic levels.
Causes of death
The data also shows that a vast majority of the deaths were caused by people either falling off trains or being run over by them. According to the NCRB, of the total railway accident deaths in 2021, 11,036 fell under this category, followed by 5,287 “other” cases. What falls under the ‘other’ category is not specified.In contrast, train collisions killed 86 and derailments 22. Nobody died in fires or explosions in 2021.
Indeed, data from the past five years follows this trend — of the 1 lakh railway accident deaths reported between 2017-21, over 71,000 people died either by falling off trains or being run over.
In comparison, only 293 died in derailments and 446 people in collisions, data shows.
Among states and Union territories, Maharashtra leads in reporting railway accident deaths — it has reported 17,000 such casualties between 2017 and 2021. It is followed by Uttar Pradesh (13,074) and West Bengal (11,967).
By comparison, Odisha’s numbers over the same period are among the lowest, at just 1,845 deaths.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also Read: Preliminary inquiry into Odisha train crash points to possible ‘signalling error’
