Tuesday night's train accident near Arakkonam in Tamil Nadu is another classic example of the Railways' unpreparedness to face business discontinuity and leaving families to cope with an irreparable loss of lives and limb. It is time to think of contemporary measures to mitigate such calamities, inherent in the Railways. A common sense approach taught in “disaster recovery planning and business continuity management” is to identify mission critical activities and the associated risks, their impact in case of disruptions, and a mitigation plan. But all this is oblivious to many, especially when things are going smooth. A disaster doesn't really stop with restoration, paying compensation and forgetting about it.
U.V. Mohan , Bangalore
The repeated occurrences of human errors leading to tragic incidents in our railway system need to be viewed from a larger perspective. James Reason of the University of Manchester, in his book, “Human Error” (1990) described that most major industrial and transportation accidents are the result of multiple latent points of system failure and not just the immediately obvious active error of the human at the controls. Errors are seen as consequences rather than causes, having their origins in systemic factors including the workplace and organisational processes. In the railways, enquiries that are conducted after every accidents are apparently exercises to fix blame rather than to fix the problem. The colonial attributes of the railway organisation absolves those in charge of decision-making in the administrative structure from their responsibilities towards safety and it is placed absolutely on the shoulders of the front-line staff. There has to be political will to correct it.
Biju Joseph , Coonoor
