Just something to think about. Dismal track record <:)=

Human error, which has become a somewhat standard phrase with the Indian Railways for explaining away gruesome accidents, is likely to be invoked yet again as over 250 people were killed and hundreds wounded when two express trains collided head-on in the Dinajpur district of West Bengal on Monday morning.

Early reports that the cause of the accident might have been a bomb explosion occasioned alarm. Sabotage, besides human error and mechanical failure, is a potent factor, especially in the north-east. There, of course, would follow a routine departmental enquiry to point out precisely what went wrong causing the Brahmaputra Express and the Assam Avadh Express to crash into each other. However, such enquiries do not appear to have done much good to the railways. In many cases, the recommendations made on the basis of the earlier accidents, and reports, had not been implemented subsequently. It is worth noting that the latest disaster has struck the railways barely a fortnight after the GT Express had rammed into a goods train near Mathura, killing 18 people. About a month earlier, the derailment of the Vishakhapatnam-Godavari Express near Secunderabad had again taken a heavy toll of human lives. That high a failure rate  whether human or mechanical  must not be taken as acceptable.

It should be even less so in an age when computer-based technologies and telecommunication facilities have made it far easier to reduce the chances of error in such critical areas as signal transmission or fault detection. But that would presuppose far better levels of human development, management and stricter norms of accountability than has been the case. There is little justification for the high accident rates the Indian railways have been reporting from year to year. The Commission headed by Justice H. R. Khanna that is currently looking into various aspects of railway safety can be trusted to take a comprehensive view of the problem with a long term perspective. The government should promptly implement its recommendations. And, if it is resource crunch that is coming in the way, the railways should re-order its priorities. For one thing, the economic losses caused as a result of each accident are enormous. Even more important, the safety of passengers must come above everything else.

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), August 03, 1999

Answers

Honestly, in a country the size of India, 250 people are census rounding error, not computer error.

-- K. Stevens (kstevens@It's ALL going away in January.com), August 04, 1999.