PUKHRAYAN (India): At least 120 people were killed after a train derailed in India on Sunday, in the worst disaster to hit the country’s aging rail network in recent years.

Emergency workers raced to find any more survivors in the mangled wreckage of the train whose 14 carriages leapt from the tracks near Kanpur (Uttar Pradesh), 450 kilometres south-east of New Delhi.

Shocked passengers recalled being jolted out of their early morning slumber by a violent thud in a remote area.

Survivors also told of their desperate search for loved ones on the train, which was carrying at least one wedding party.

“My 12-year-old daughter is missing, I have been looking for her for hours,” a survivor said at the accident site, breaking into uncontrollable sobs. “My wife has received serious head injuries and I have lost all my belongings. I am feeling so helpless; my whole world has turned upside down.”

Hundreds of army and police personnel have been deployed at the scene, where rescue workers used metal cutters to slice through severely mangled carriages to try to get to survivors.

Disaster response teams set up special lights to ensure rescue work was not hampered in the night.

“We have been able to pull out 24 people so far, out of whom five were found to be alive,” said Brig A. Chhibbar, who was leading the army’s rescue operations. “We will carry on day and night, till there is any inkling of even a single person being pulled alive.”

Police said 120 people had been killed and at least 200 others were undergoing treatment in nearby hospitals, which were placed on high alert after the early morning disaster.

“The death toll has reached 120. At least 200 others are injured,” Zaki Ahmad, police chief of Kanpur zone, said.

The accident was the worst since 2010 when a passenger train crashed into a freight train in West Bengal, killing 146 and injuring over 200.

Authorities launched an official investigation into the accident, which junior railways minister Manoj Sinha said might have been caused by damage to the tracks.

India’s railway network, one of the world’s largest, is still the main form of long-distance travel in the vast country, but it is poorly funded and deadly accidents occur relatively frequently.

A 2012 government report said almost 15,000 people were killed every year on India’s railways, describing the deaths as an annual “massacre”.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has pledged to invest $137 billion over five years to modernise the railways.

Published in Dawn November 21st, 2016