NEW DELHI: A fatal collision between two passenger trains in India’s Andhra Pradesh last year occurred because two crew members in one of the trains were “distracted” by a cricket match, Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said.

“The recent case in Andhra Pradesh happened because both the loco pilot and co-pilot were distracted by the cricket match which was going on,” the Press Trust of India quoted him as saying on Saturday.

India were playing England in the World Cup fixture in Lucknow on the fatal day.

PTI cited Mr Vaishnaw as saying that the two crew members were watching the match on a phone. “Now we are installing systems which can detect any such distraction and make sure that the pilots and the assistant pilots are fully focussed on running the train,” Mr Vaishnaw said.

India were playing England in a World Cup fixture on the day when the collision left 14 people dead and 50 others injured

“We will continue to put our focus on safety. We try to find out the root cause of every incident and we come up with a solution so that it is not repeated.” Fourteen people died and at least 50 others were injured on Oct 29, 2023 when the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada passenger train hit the Visakhapatnam-Palasa passenger train from behind in Andhra Pradesh’s Vizianagaram district. The Visakhapatnam-Palasa train had stopped because of a break in an overhead cable when the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada train hit it, Reuters had then reported.

A spokesperson for the East Coast Railway then stated that a “likely reason” for the collision was “human error” on part of the Rayagada train crew and their skipping a red signal. A day later, a preliminary investigation by the railways said the collision was caused by the Rayagada train not stopping at and then slowly proceeding past a ‘defective’ automatic signal, The Wire said. Both crew members died in the incident, PTI reported.

V. Balachandran, who as of October was general secretary of the All India Loco Running Staff Association, told The Hindu that the association had written to the railways days before the accident about the auto signalling system. According to him, the association said train crews needed “intensive training” to become familiar with the auto signalling system, which he said was newly commissioned in the area. “Being a newly introduced system, repeated representations were given to the authorities concerned, including the General Manager, Divisional Railway manager and others, requesting to impart intensive training for Loco Pilots and Assistant Loco Pilots to understand the working of the signals … but it was never done,” Balachandran was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

The Andhra Pradesh incident took place four months after three trains were involved in a collision near Odisha’s Balasore. In the June 2 incident, 292 people had died.

The Central Bureau of Investigation filed a charge-sheet in September against three railway employees — two signals personnel and one technician — in relation to the Balasore incident. A railway safety investigation into the Balasore incident said that signalling errors had contributed to the collision.

Published in Dawn, March 5th, 2024