Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Jun 12, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Jun 12, 2003 |
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Logistics
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Railways MoU with Defence soon for rail mishap relief operations Our Bureau
MUMBAI, July 11 THE Ministry of Railways is in the process of signing a MoU with the Defence Ministry for enlisting the latter's help in terms of deployment of men and machinery, including helicopters, for logistic support during post-accident relief operations, according to Mr Bandaru Dattatreya, Union Minister of State for Railways. He told press persons here on Wednesday that this was one of the 111 recommendations of the high-level committee that recently went into the various aspects of safety and relief measures to be undertaken by the Indian Railways. He said the Ministry was also initiating a move to sign MoUs with the State Governments, chalking out their roles in relief operations in the event of any accident within their respective States. The Minister said the expenditure of the Railways towards implementation of various safety measures, including track renewals, bridge repair works and rolling stock has been increased from Rs 1,134 crore in 2001-02 to Rs 2,310 crore in 2002-03, which was expected to touch Rs 2,311 crore in the current fiscal. Throwing light on the White Paper on Safety on Indian railways, Mr S.M. Singla, General Manager of Western Railway, said there had been a 80 per cent reduction in train accidents since 1960-61, despite a nearly 535 per cent increase in passenger traffic and 360 per cent increase in freight traffic. The number of train accidents per million train km has come down from 3.3 in the 1960s and 0.7 in the 1990s to 0.51 during 2002-03. ``This rate was lower than those recorded even by some of the developed countries like Germany (0.91 accidents per million trail kms.), France (0.84), Italy (0.73) and Japan (0.65),'' he pointed out. According to Mr Singla, 75 per cent of the accidents on Indian Railways (3,333 in number) were due to derailments, while 7 per cent (319) and 2 per cent (84) were due to collision and fire/explosion respectively.
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