India rail disaster kills 36 people; fears toll may rise
RESCUERS struggled yesterday to pull survivors from the wreckage of a train crash which killed 36 passengers in southern India, the latest in a series of disasters on the country’s creaking rail network.
Officials were investigating whether Maoist rebels had tampered with the track, after eight coaches and the engine of the Jagdalpur-Bhubaneswar Express were derailed at around 11pm on Saturday.
“The death toll has gone up to 36. It is a possibility that it may rise further,” Anil Kumar Saxena, national railway spokesman, said.
Another railways official JP Mishra earlier said some 50 injured have been moved to nearby hospitals.
The accident happened near Kuneru railway station in the remote district of Vizianagaram in Andhra Pradesh state.
It came only two months after nearly 150 people were killed in a similar disaster, highlighting the malaise on a network which is one of the world’s largest.
Saxena said government officials and emergency workers worked through the night to try to find survivors.
The spokesman said investigators were considering possible sabotage of the tracks by Maoist rebels, who he said were active in the area.
“It is being looked into, it is one of the many angles we are looking into,” he said. “There is some suspicion [of sabotage] because two other trains had crossed over smoothly using the same tracks earlier in the night.”
Television footage showed a line of carriages lying on their sides as rescuers in neon orange safety vests and hard hats tried to hoist passengers through the windows while locals looked on.
Workers carried a half-naked passenger covered in dust on a stretcher out of a tilted carriage. AnotherTV image showed a man lying faced down, crushed under mangled heaps of wreckage.
Injured victims lay on hospital beds and stretchers, their limbs swathed in bandages.
Mishra told the NDTV news network there were some 600 people in the carriages that derailed.
India’s railway network is still the main form of long-distance travel in the vast country, but it is poorly funded and deadly accidents occur relatively often.
The latest deadly incident comes two months after 146 people were killed when a passenger train was derailed near Kanpur, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, in one of the country’s worst rail disasters for decades.
A 2012 government report said almost 15,000 people were killed every year on India’s railways and described the loss of life as an annual “massacre”.