Editorial
Railway safety concerns
Structural measures imperative
RAILWAYS have become something remote as far as our choice of options for long distance travelling goes. It hardly ever makes news like addition of railway tracks, new trains to the fleet or a marked improvement in the amenities, because all this can only be a drop in the ocean. Usually, therefore, it makes news for wrong reasons hogging headlines following disastrous accidents that were mostly avoidable.
But such mishaps were just waiting to happen given the rundown railway tracks, outmoded signaling system, unguarded level-crossings and frequent mechanical and human failures. To top it off, the railway administration has been in comatose as far as enforcing safety standards goes.
We would concentrate on three drawbacks that will have to be overcome if we are to raise the safety standards to acceptable levels. These relate to doing away with unauthorised railway level-crossings, encroachments on railway tracks and meeting the shortage of technical hands.
It is surprising to note that many level-crossings were set up courtesy the LGRD ministry while laying new roads without the knowledge, far less permission, of the Bangladesh Railway. This is a serious coordination lapse at an operative level of vital importance to public safety. Highway engineering and railway engineering are not the one and the same thing. Since the responsibility of looking after an unforeseen, even an improvised railway crossing falls on the already meagre railway staff, how unguarded these would be can be easily imagined.
Secondly, trespassing on railway tracks by squatting hawkers, makeshift shops and slumming is a major hazard in the metropolis and other cities and also a prime cause for accidents. It is time such habitation and business activity along the tracks is discouraged at the ward levels with their relocation elsewhere under a programme that seems currently missing.
The overarching need is to strengthen technical manpower base in the railway in a marked way so that the critical dependence on overworked and fatigued personnel can be obviated. What can be a more glaring measure of low priority accorded to the railways than the fact that no new hands have been recruited in the last quarter of a century.
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