Monday, September 20, 2010

Indian railway accidents

I guess many of my fellow citizens would be feeling the same as I am upon reading a today's news about the madhya pradesh accident . I made an approximate estimate of railway accidents world wide. In the year 2010(till today), of 43 accidents reported world wide 14 happened in India.

Total fatalities world wide except india : 146
Total fatalities in India alone : 207

If the blame is on the usual reason of high population, then China had just 9 fatalities this year. I can also observe that the nature of accidents in the rest of the world are just accidents, whereas in our case most of the fatalities are because of sheer negligence. It never happens anywhere else two trains collapse on the same track, again and again. Being an engineer, I am aware, that there are several cost effective accident prevention technologies available, but still they seem far beyond the values of the lives of our people.

May be they are not counted, because the rich don't have to travel in the trains.