Railway Accidents

It is truly impressive that normally quiet respected friends of mine are stirred to come out with their thoughts recently in mails to me.

For a railway man an accident and determination of cause never ceases to provoke and invariably the battle lines are drawn department wise.

Rarely truth is revealed. The technical fights are taken to the hollowed grounds of RDSO too, which is supposed to be a technical body, but there too, the same field attitudes prevail.

Logical updating of Criteria for evaluating safety of track-vehicle interaction and safety certification process by RDSO for a new rolling stock got never done.

The case of CRT wagon which got introduced despite poor oscillation trial results, one cannot forget. The way track engineers too fight not to budge from their poor track standards in earlier years, forced Tandon to introduce BOX-N, to"destroy" tracks, which he told me, with a wink at that time. Then track engineers went about introducing 90UTS rails.

Confrontations, arguments and debates do improve to shake up the system and improve but it is not necessarily to be done at a high cost to the system and with a bad blood.

Frequency domain analysis and advanced mathematical modelling for simulating the conditions which are not possible to cover by the limited few kilometers of tests with limited parametric variations, never got off the ground. Safety case analysis is less than satisfactory by international standards. Resistance was and is phenomenal.

The core problem is that RDSO is trying to function as the technical authority with no training except for the field training, for its incumbents occupying and warming the chairs, thereby becoming experts, who somehow spend time to go back to field to seek the career opportunity. True, none joined service to become Professors or scientists or mathematical geniuses.

The day you wear the hat of a Director, within 24 hours, you hold the power of veto on anything that moves in RDSO, which concerns your department. Inter-disciplinary problems are sought to be solved purely with departmental bias.

Individuals who come there from organised services. are excellent and brilliant but ambitious too , naturally. But their eyes are to reach the positions they desire and aspire to be back in railways.

Meantime, the waiting tenure in RDSO is spent as best as they can-- some learn quite a lot-- some contribute significantly within the limitations- but every one wants to get back.

In restructuring the system to allow for truly technology cycles to take off, it was proposed that the officers who opt to join RDSO, should accept a one way ticket -- that is they do get 30 to 50% higher emoluments, performance based and Scientific cadre grades based, in situ promotions, but first go through a rigorous IIT based one year course leading to a diploma/post graduate qualification in basic mathematical modelling and research tools, losing also the departmental tag, remaining a Railway Man only, without departmental administrative bias, anymore.

The institution should become autonomous body under the control of S&T Ministry, but grants for running the same are given by Railways. This would prevent any further influence of bosses in Railways riding over the work of the RDSO.

It may be argued that then it will become another ghost CSIR lab with the same level of zero performance and lots of privileges with easy life. It is possible. But the hope is since with basic field experience of a say a decade, the persons are brought in to the system, the love and commitment built in to the officer, for railway, and the sacrifice he has to make to leave his own service, may all add up to a renewed vigor to push the boundaries of knowledge to contribute to railway working.

Like all things in our country, it is again , we may have to give ourselves a chance.

When your door to return to operational railway is shut and you by attitude choose and excel in work of the advancement of safety and technology improvements, and your advice carries the authority of an autonomous independent body, the truth has a chance.

Truly outstanding officers who want to really improve do get stifled in RDSO. The departmental one up man-ship games each one plays makes it a zero sum game.

We end up producing hot air and safety and technology become victims of product sellers' lobbies.

Where every one believes his own version as the truth, truth dies.

We refuse to allow the CRS reports of accident inquiry to be made public. Why not? A publicly conducted inquiry, if the entire report is public, then we can analyse what led the authority to conclude what he concluded. It is unfair to the authority to take all mud slings, without knowing what exactly was the basis for conclusions drawn. if baseless conclusions are seen to be arrived at, let the stupidity be exposed.

Or some technical base was there, because , always the technical wing of RDSO is consulted by CRS, which forms his basis-- normally they avoid their own conclusions. Like every one else in our system, they also are bureaucrats.

Again the bane of our world is working in secrecy.

Cheers--the world goes on...the Indian Railways too will survive all these ideas.

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