DEATH ON THE TRACKS

Eight people died every day on Mumbai’s railway tracks in 2017, down 20 per cent from 10 deaths every day in 2013, the data from the Government Railway Police, Mumbai, show.

Around 8 million passengers — more than the population of Hyderabad — travel on the Mumbai rail network every weekday on 2,800 services. It is the highest passenger density in the world.

A woman was killed after being hit by a train at Bandra station on July 19, 2018, when she was trying to cross the tracks with her two children, local newspapers reported. The children were injured in the incident. In another incident, a 50-year-old banker died after she slipped into the gap between the train and a platform at Borivali station.

Mumbai’s Elphinstone station was renamed Prabhadevi on July 19, 2018, which led to questions about renaming stations instead of focusing on the city’s crumbling rail infrastructure.

As many as 18,050 deaths were reported on Mumbai’s railway tracks over the last five years (as of July 20, 2018). Of these, 89 per cent were male. Many of those who died on the tracks go untraced or unidentified, the data show.

Passenger deaths from falling off trains in Mumbai were “very high” as coaches carried more passengers than their capacity, stated a 2016 report on suburban train services by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India.

In 2014-15, the average number of passengers per coach on Mumbai’s suburban central services was 6 per cent (2,666) more than the “crush load”— double the capacity — while it was 9 per cent (2,743) more than the crush load on the western line services, the data stated.