President Musharraf wants immediate report in the Sayilabad village (Mehrabpur) railway accident of Wednesday in which the Railways have downgraded the number of deaths to 35, from 50 reported in the newspapers this morning. The cause of accident this time has not been attributed to sabotage, a departure from the usual refuge sought in such tragic circumstances.
The tragedy becomes more pronounced because only two or three days ago the new caretaker minister for Railways reporting improvement in his department to the Senate Standing Committee. He might have inherited this habit from his predecessor Shaikh Rashid Ahmad.
It may be recalled that the previous Minister who seemed much more interested in reporting the political strategies of his chief President Musharraf, which turned out to be true in most of the cases. However, in this regard, he would report nothing but the best insisting that much more improvements had been effected in this department than ever before, even though a number of accidents also happened in his tenure. But he was more prone to gloss over them, attributing such accidents to acts of sabotage.
A passenger who has used the Railways for upcountry travels on a number of travels, from one designated train to another, hazards the guess that the deficiency in the department lies much more on gelding the staff into a team to serve the organisation and in knowledge-sharing. In his opinion no officer of the Railways has any knowledge of any thing happening on the train.
It is usual for the train examiner to send carriages on the platform without checking its breaks, electricity connections, if the fans, lights, switches and air conditions function properly or not. This passenger has often travelled in lower air conditioned class in dark, and without the air conditioner functioning. He also said he could not ascertain whose job is it on the train to look into the toilets, whether they have water or washing pots 'lotas'.
Even reporting the defects to the Conductor Guard does not produce any good result. Most of the time he shrugs of the responsibility answering it is not his job, or promises to have the cistern filled with water, or fix the run-down electricity system in the next station, which does not happen.
Security is the least concern of any one the compartment in trains like the Karachi Express is accessible all the time by tea, cold drink, and trinket vendors, who keep crossing from one compartment to another, while the police shuffles around during the day-time (at night they mostly sleep in berths) not taken by passengers, soliciting drinks and foods from vendors as they hop from one carriage to another.
Given this casual attitude of not paying serious attention on the running trains, it would be more or less certain that people outside on the ground connected with train operations would do their work with any seriousness. Certainly not the man manning manual job of transferring trains from one track to another, giving the little satisfaction his job pays in term of remuneration.
This well travelled man on the trains said he could not for this life understand all this talk about computerised train-tacking. He said that if it were true that a computer was keeping track on running trains he could not understand why the trains are hours late, and many do not take off from railways stations on time. What is the use of a railway time-table if such are the circumstances?
Without influencing the enquiry report this man thinks the reason for accident is that no one in the railway is prepared to mind his business, but he is more prepared in reminiscing on all the cash privilege especially the overtime package he has lost in recent days.
In fact, accidents are a regular happening in the country's railway network. Last October, 12 people were killed in a train accident near a Lahore railways crossing. About 130 people died in a train accident in July 2005. This time three trains collided with each other.