 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. We have with us D. Raghunandan. We will discuss disaster that has taken place on the railway over bridge in Parel. Raghun, what explains such a major disaster and what explains why from 1913 the over bridge capacity has not been expanded given the fact that the population, the number of people travelling has increased by such a high amount. I think there are two things to be taken note of. One is the general increase in the population in Bombay and consequently the increase in the traffic in the railway system which today has crossed 7 million a day. But the second part of it is over the last 30 plus years when the old mill lands were removed. The population density in the mill areas has which is now been replaced by commercial buildings. The population density today is about 7 to 10 times greater than it was earlier. In the mills you had single storied X number of workers in the mills. Today you have high rise buildings with 5 to 7 times the floor area ratio and that many more times the number of people coming and going. So in fact the footfalls in Parel and Elphinstone stations have gone up by more than 10 times over the last 15 to 20 years without any commensurate upgradation of the infrastructure including this foot over bridge. Fifteen years ago a sanction was given to either the expansion of this existing foot over bridge or an addition of an extra foot over bridge which would be at least 3 meters wide. The current one is barely above 1 meter. Fifteen years that sanction has been lying there and no administration, central government, railway minister, nobody has done anything about it till now. So the question that you asked what explains this is sheer lack of planning, lack of urban planning, lack of response to changed demographics in the urban area, lack of creation of additional infrastructure in that area in keeping with the demographic changes and as far as the railways are concerned which run the system complete callousness in terms of upgradation of the infrastructure. Is it also the fact that the railways is focused much more on what would be called the high end sector, the 5 percent traffic which is the major corridors which they have made super fast, fast and so on and really neglected the rest of the 95 percent system including essentially the infrastructure for these kind of metro projects is also interesting. They have added bogies so the number of people travelling have increased, frequency has increased, what is not increased is the basic infrastructure. And this is precisely I think the problem with the railways today. The railways has for long now been complaining about being forced to become an unviable sector and has put all the blame on the low paying passengers which are actually 90 percent of the travelling public in this country which travels sleeper class or lower or travels in the suburban rail networks like in Bombay. As you rightly said all the upgradation that is taken place in terms of rolling stock, electrification of tracks, speeding up of trains including locos has taken place on the higher end of the passenger segments in the Rajdhanis and Shatabdhi's and Duronto Express. This is where all the investments have gone because again for the railways this is the segment which supposedly brings them in higher revenues. So they do not want to spend money on the high polo as it were prefers to spend their money on the 10 percent of the travelling public who travel by the higher classes and have not spent any money on upgradation of basic infrastructure which carries the bulk of the rail passengers. Due to this and related policies in terms of favouring roads, road transport network, vehicle manufacturers etc. India has seen the proportion of rail passengers come down from about 85 percent of total passenger traffic at the time of independence down to less than 20 percent. Yeah but today Raghu if you take the metro areas, both the metro that we are seeing as well as the suburban rail system this is not what is happening, there is actually an increase and this particular accident is really the result of not keeping up as you said with the infrastructure. And in this case the infrastructure as you rightly said populations going up, the footfalls have increased, passenger traffic has increased but the infrastructure remains the same because these are not really vanity projects of Durant or a super fast and now the bullet train and now can you charge very high rates from daily commuters inside the city. But you know this is the whole issue, you are willing to build for instance roads and nobody asks people to pay for the roads and you know in cities you really not going to have tolls all this kind of stuff but when it comes to rails you want the people to pay for it, well this is a basic infrastructure for people to travel for the city and this is not something which should be paid only out of the ticket sales that you make. Absolutely and this is where I think this unholy nexus that is built up between the state and essentially a contractor lobby which builds highways and the automobile manufacturers which wants to put vehicles on the road whether it is on the highways or it is inside the cities unable to be able to compete making sure that railways and other mass transit systems do not enter. Basically subsidized automobiles, mass trucks and so on through all the basic infrastructure indeed while railways are supposed to pay for themselves and that is been one of the main problems. Mass transit suffers and everything else is getting supported. Real issue has been now that the basic safety earlier it was a question of amenities, now we are talking about basic safety, rail tracks not being maintained, cracks on the tracks of very large number known as fractures and those fractures are increasing and not being addressed or addressed in a much slower way than need to be. We saw disasters taking place in accidents over the last six months and now this do you think it is a wake up fall for Indian railways or do you think they still prefer to gloss this over and go the bullet train way. We are making a huge investment in the so called bullet train which we have discussed it is really a vanity project and this is the vanity project as opposed to the basic needs of the people. To answer your question is this a wake up call? There have been I think repeated alarms and wake up calls over the past 15 years but nobody has woken up that is the reality. This is not the first and it is not going to be the last rail tracks require serious safety audits and up gradation and earlier audit report had said that close to 80 percent of bridges over which railway trains pass are in precarious conditions so you are likely to see accidents there as well. Apart from running trains safety included collision avoidance systems no significant expenditure has taken place in this area nor is there a concerted drive in that direction. So safety has definitely been sacrificed in favor of just somehow keeping the system moving. There is one point I think we ought to take note of also when it comes to safety. Young countries which run large systems transport systems railways air traffic India is almost unique in vesting safety regulations and guidance in the same authority which runs the system itself. In this case the railways all railway safety comes back under the railway board. So who inquires into railway accidents the railway officers themselves it is not very likely that they are going to blame each other or the system. So in yesterday's foot over bridge accident they have blamed the mob behavior they have blamed sudden rains everything except the lack of infrastructure and the lack of attention to that the same with the earlier derailment that took place. In aircraft you have got the director general civil aviation who certifies every aircraft and its airworthiness before they take off. It is the same DGCA which conducts safety audits and inspections and accident reports after an accident is over. There is no way you are going to be able to pin responsibility or have serious recommendations to transform systems if this system continues of having the same body audit itself and conduct inquiry into itself. This is unsustainable. The reality is we all know what the truth is in the in terms of accidents the safety measures which are not being taken every railway officer that you can beat will tell you the same thing this is not the best kept secret in the country. So the fact that they are still talking about mob behavior and rains is just another shall be say very weak excuse for the reality of what the inter railways today is going into. Thank you very much for being with us please keep watching news click for further discussions on this and other subjects.