What happened?
In the morning rush hour of September 29, a narrow bridge — connecting Mumbai’s Elphinstone Road railway station on the Western Railway network, the Parel station on the Central Railway network, and the spanking new business centres in the vicinity — became overloaded with commuters for two reasons: one, it began raining and instead of venturing into the roofless open road, travellers stopped at the top of the bridge to wait out the rain; and two, according to the police investigating the gruesome events that followed, someone shouted, Phool gir gaya (“Flowers have fallen”), leading people to hear it as Pul gir gaya (“The bridge has fallen”). The resulting chaos led to an unprecedented stampede that led to the death of 23 people and several others being injured and, according to experts, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
How old is the rail system?
Mumbai’s suburban rail network is the oldest and biggest in the country. India’s first train ran between Bori Bunder (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus) and Thane, a distance of 34 km. This was in April 1853. It then took the train nearly 75 minutes to reach its destination. Now, 164 years later, it takes a train 60 minutes to cover the same distance. The city’s suburban rail system, excluding the single-line Metro and a short monorail system, extends to more than 425 km in length, and is divided into five sub-networks. Together, their annual ridership is an estimated 264 crore, with each train carrying at least four times its intended capacity.
What about upgrades?
Over the years, the Mumbai suburban rail network has been upgraded several times. For instance, instead of seven and nine-car rakes, there are 12 and 15-car rakes in operation today. The number of services, too, has risen steadily, along with an improvement and automation of the signalling system. Besides, there are almost no pedestrian railway crossings left, leaving trains to run optimally without stopping for people and vehicles to cross tracks.
Yet, the fatalities continue. On average, 13 people die every day on the tracks — either by falling from a running train or on the tracks. This year alone, 1,590 people died while travelling on trains in the first six months, making it one of the deadliest years on record. In 2016, Mumbai recorded 3,202 deaths, of which more than half occurred while people were crossing railway tracks.
Will this be a wake-up call?
Even though the city’s rail network has expanded over the years — and more expansions are on the anvil — it has not kept pace with Mumbai’s rapidly changing demographics. A clear example is the Elphinstone Road stampede.
Right up to the 1980s and 1990s, a majority of businesses were located in the southern and south-central parts of Mumbai. But with rising real estate prices, businesses and families began to shift to the relatively less-exploited areas, such as the north-western suburbs, the central suburbs, Navi Mumbai, and Thane, which were, until the early 2000s, mainly residential havens.
Mumbai, with an extended metropolitan region population of 2.2 crore, no longer has a single central business district. As a result, the rush-hour traffic is more widespread than it was a decade ago. In fact, railway experts say that there is no such thing as non-peak hours in Mumbai as trains continue to be overcrowded through the day.
However, except for a few changes to the platforms and stations themselves, the upgrades have not kept pace with the demands of a people always in a hurry. Elphinstone Road’s bridge is a symptom of that deep malaise. Even after a stern warning from a Shiv Sena MP about the bridge two years ago, the Railway Ministry did little to change things on the ground.
Can Railways do it alone?
Following the stampede, the Railway Ministry promised a massive overhaul of the suburban system, including safety measures, hardware upgrades and services. But it could run into problems like an integrated ticketing system with the BEST bus network, as it is run by the local municipality. The Mumbai Rail Vikas Corporation’s massive expansion projects, set up under the aegis of the Mumbai Urban Transport Project-II, are far behind their original deadlines. But as the Elphinstone Road stampede proved, the time to plan is over. The time to execute is now.
