[Between 2009-’10 to 2015-’16, railway accidents in India killed 620 people. Yet this fails to cause an uproar. The people being mangled to death in bogeys are not very rich or urban, so they catch the attention of the English-language media only briefly. Flight delays make more of a splash on television news than do train accident deaths. But without pressure, politicians will do little to push towards any improvement. In fact, India’s priorities are so misplaced that the Narendra Modi government has announced a fantastically expensive bullet train between Mumbai and Surat. It is estimated to cost nearly Rs 100,000 crore. The country’s middles classes have hailed this as a marker of development, the catch-all-term now in fashion. That development, as it is currently understood, focuses on an expensive train – for which the fare will be in the same ballpark as an aeroplane ticket – but not the deaths of citizens is a truly worrying portent for India’s future.]
https://scroll.in/article/827419/the-daily-fix-rather-than-dreaming-of-bullet-trains-india-needs-to-urgently-tackle-rail-safety Rather than dreaming of bullet trains, India needs to urgently tackle rail safety 8 hours ago Updated 8 hours ago Shoaib Daniyal The holy rail Almost any documentary about Gandhi shows him chugging around India in a third-class train compartment, meeting eager crowds at every station en route to his destination. That is one of the starker examples of how the colonial rail network nurtured Indian nationalism, allowing residents of the subcontinent to cement their common identity. Yet for a network so vital, free India has mostly neglected it. Even though the rail network is acknowledged to be tbe backbone of the country, the population per kilometre of track in India is only 63% of China’s. Moreover, India has mostly neglected the quality of its tracks, updating the Raj-built network only infrequently. This means that Indian Railways can seem unnervingly unsafe, with accidents occurring with alarming regularity. On Saturday, there was another. Thirty nine people were killed as a train went off the rails in Andhra Pradesh. This is the third major train derailment in two months. On November 10, the Indore-Patna Express derailed, killing 150 people. On December 26, the Sealdah-Ajmer Express went of the tracks, injuring 43. ***Between 2009-’10 to 2015-’16, railway accidents in India killed 620 people. Yet this fails to cause an uproar. The people being mangled to death in bogeys are not very rich or urban, so they catch the attention of the English-language media only briefly. Flight delays make more of a splash on television news than do train accident deaths. But without pressure, politicians will do little to push towards any improvement.*** [Emphasis added.] ***In fact, India’s priorities are so misplaced that the Narendra Modi government has announced a fantastically expensive bullet train between Mumbai and Surat. It is estimated to cost nearly Rs 100,000 crore. The country’s middles classes have hailed this as a marker of development, the catch-all-term now in fashion. That development, as it is currently understood, focuses on an expensive train – for which the fare will be in the same ballpark as an aeroplane ticket – but not the deaths of citizens is a truly worrying portent for India’s future.*** [Emphasis added.] -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
