Four people died and several others were injured, some of them seriously, when they fell off a moving train in suburban Mumbai on Monday. That the incident sent shockwaves through an otherwise very resilient city, speaks volumes of the level of unaccountability that has crept into the system, which is now reaching a point where even the most cynical are beginning to be concerned.
The first reaction of the authorities was to try and blame the incident on this thing called overcrowding of the train. Such a framing of the issue seeks to put the blame of the deaths on the passengers who chose to travel on an already crowded train. What needs to be clear, however, is that these passengers are not travelling in an overcrowded train out of choice. They are doing so out of compulsion or a lack of a better option in a city that is bursting at its seams and is suffering from decades of lack of investment in public transit infrastructure.
Instead of trying to improve its mass transit systems, successive governments have instead focussed on car-centric infrastructure like the coastal road and the like which does little to alleviate the transit for the common man but is of a huge benefit to the car owners -- someone who isn’t suffering from the pain of a daily transit in the first place.
Not only that, but the city has actively neglected its public transport systems. The city’s bus service BEST today has fewer buses running the streets than it did a decade ago. Rather than expand on the existing fleet the government has spent its time and money building flyovers and, rather than having a holistic approach towards understanding the needs of its working-class citizens.
It goes without saying that the urban infrastructure needs to be planned holistically, by reaching out to the people, understanding their transit needs, surveys, and traveller data, and the infrastructure needs to be designed accordingly. It is for this reason that including us in Goa, activists and town planners have been crying hoarse for planned development rather than piecemeal changes to benefit private individuals.
The other aspect that needs to be tackled is the railway management. Now there are no easy answers to this one. While the railways has now announced that suburban trains will have doors that shut, that will not answer the problem created by the sheer number of people that need to be moved from their homes to their workplaces on a daily basis.
It is in fact a miracle, given the condition that people travel in on a daily basis that mass casualty events are not even more frequent than they already are. Mumbai has had its fair share of stampedes and while people losing their lives while falling from trains or being knocked down by them are a daily occurrence, the risks they face on a daily basis are far higher.
Answers can be found after we start demanding accountability from our elected representatives who, it would seem, are only interested in power for power’s sake rather than for doing good or improving our daily lives -- something they’ve been actually elected to do.
Too often they are caught up in fulfilling favours rather than thinking of the good of the people and even less of the job they are tasked with doing.
