MUMBAI: Every morning college student Siddhi Sarangdhar squeezes herself onto a Mumbai train and hopes she will survive the journey to school on the world’s busiestand deadliest rail network.

The death toll on Mumbai’s railways averages a dozen a day more than a whole year on New York’s subway system, which has an average annual accidental death rate of eight.

“It’s a big achievement getting on. Then standing is really difficult and getting off is another problem,” said Sarangdhar.

Mumbai’s rail system brings 6.5 million commuters into the city every day, six times the traffic of New York trains.

The result, railway officials say, is trains packed to 2.5 times capacity during rush hour.

Railway cars designed for 200 passengers are crammed with 500 at peak times. In the first four months of this year, 1,146 commuters died and 1,395 were injured, railway police said.

Many of the victims had been hanging on the side of the packed trains, unable even to wedge themselves inside, and fell to their deaths after losing their grip, they said. Last year’s total toll was 3,997 deaths and 4,307 injuries.

“We could enforce a limit on the number of people on a train but people still need to go to work. They’ll sit on the tracks and stop trains from moving,” Central Railways chief security commissioner BS Sidhu said.

“Overcrowding can be prevented only by very broad alterations to the system,” he said.

Two billion dollars, part of it from a World Bank loan, have been earmarked to improve public transport in Mumbai, a city of 18 million, by 2015.

But although authorities are working to increase the number of trains and their frequency, commuter figures appear to be growing at a faster pace.

While a third of deaths are of passengers losing their grip on the side of the train, nearly half are people hit by trains as they stroll on the tracks.

“The number of preventable deaths should come down in the years to come. But unpreventable deaths are unpreventable,” Sidhu said.

Unpreventable deaths from the railway’s view include those passengers hit by trains when crossing tracks to get to another platform, illegal but not unusual.

Railway authorities have tried to combat the practice by fining tens of thousands of lawbreakers, erecting fences and asking people to identify places where footbridges should be built.—AFP