Surprise Is Not a Safety System
The wrong voltage on a sensor is not bad luck—It is the cadre confusion of 2016 arriving, exactly on schedule, in the shape of a fire!
“The shock will be worth something on the day it is followed by a consequence that lands on a vendor, or an officer, who has earned one. Until that day, the body count is not an accident!”
A door sensor on a Vande Bharat rake in Northern Railway was found wired to a 110-volt supply where 24 volts belonged. The component had no business seeing that voltage. It saw it anyway, and the train caught fire. At the Board’s #safety-review on 11 June, the agreed response was that other railways should be “careful.” #Careful — as though the fault were a turn in the weather and not a wiring error on a train that costs a fortune and is sold to the travelling public as the future.
Run down the rest of that morning’s agenda and the grammar simply repeats itself. #HAHWs that fail in service even after has validated them: “RDSO advised to be stricter. Screw couplings parting.” CBC couplers and side buffers not holding: “noted.” A #BTPN rake off the road at Kharagpur because the side bearers sat at uneven free height and nobody had counted the washers: “RDSO advised to study it further.” #NMG rakes derailing: “advised not to stable them on sections prone to derailment” — an admission dressed up as an instruction. A foreign object discovered welded into a wagon bogie: “to be investigated.” A coach headstock that worked loose because the steel was never IRSM-41 to begin with (see, “A Coach Broke in Two—The Real Crack Is in Rail Bhavan”), flagged. Old material used in a #POH because the must-change item was simply not in stock. Every entry real, every entry serious, and every one of them met with the same managerial verb — “advised, noted, to be studied.”
Surprise is only honest if you did not know. The Board knows. By its own account in that room, fittings that overheat, wiring laid badly inside a light fixture, vendors whose product carries a documented history of failure — none of it is a secret. It is, in the meeting’s own phrasing, talked about daily. The officers who once moved against such vendors were rewarded with complaints and then hounded for years while the vendor walked back in through the front door. That is not an organisation caught unawares. That is an organisation that has decided, repeatedly and at the very top, that astonishment is cheaper than action has been logging the same fortnightly drumbeat for months (see, “A Fortnight of Failures, and a Board Too Busy to Read Them”), even as the hoardings insist on a different reality (see, “WR: Glossy Posters vs. Grim Reality: The Mirage of Indian Railway Progress”).
If you want the true measure of how this Board behaves when the cheating is brazen rather than ambiguous, leave the safety review for a moment and look at the locomotive shells. 12 locomotives are in traffic today built on steel passed off as the copper-bearing CCU grade the specification demands — steel that turned out, under the Railways’ own XRF spectrometer, to carry no copper at all. Ordinary structural plate, roughly six rupees a kilogram cheaper, holding up the spine of a working locomotive (see, “Editorial: The Steel That Was Never There”). Each shell costs some ₹80 lakh. Around 700 are in the pipeline, overwhelmingly from one supplier.
The fraud was caught cleanly, in the Railways’ own laboratory, and then — nothing. No FIR. No arrest. The inspector whose team produced the finding was transferred out of the shop. The vendor remains an approved Part-I source for the complete shell while standing simultaneously delisted from seven of the eight load-bearing sub-assemblies that make that shell up. When a Kolkata firm was caught supplying counterfeit circuit breakers worth a few lakh, an FIR followed within weeks. For a structural fraud running into crores, on the flagship train’s own locomotives, the institutional reflex was a proposal to recover six rupees per kilogram and close the file.
So put the question the way it deserves to be put. An organisation that will not lodge a complaint even when its own spectrometer hands it the evidence — what, precisely, is it performing when it expresses shock at the next fire? Grief, on this record, is the thing the Board does instead of the thing the file requires of it. It is the cheaper substitute, and everyone in the room understands that it is. “The Conceit of Process” named the wider disease with some exactness: “the system did not break, it worked exactly as it was built to, and the one question nobody is paid to ask is who is protecting the buyer — the citizen whose money and safety are being signed away across the noting sheets?”
And, the fires are not even mysterious. A Rajdhani Express burning at Kota over loose tubelight fittings in a doorway; a Vande Bharat door sensor fed 110 volts where the drawing said 24 — these are electrical-maintenance failures on coaching stock. Electrical maintenance of coaching stock has — since 3 August 2016 — been handed to a mechanical cadre under Office Order 58 (see, “Office Order 58 of 2016 has finally caught up with Indian Railways” and “Office Order 58 of 2016 has finally caught up with Indian Railways, Part-II: The First Shot, Nine Years On”). The asset moved to one hierarchy; the engineers who actually understood it did not follow. A man trained on bogies is now answerable for the wiring loom of an electric trainset. The wrong voltage on a sensor is not bad luck. It is the cadre confusion of 2016 arriving, exactly on schedule, in the shape of a fire. That diagnosis has sat on the record for years. The Board read it, and expressed surprise anyway.
There is a tidy word for what the Board does at these reviews — it records displeasure, it advises strictness, it asks other railways to be careful — and the word is “proforma”. It means the words are produced because the occasion demands words, not because anyone present intends to act on them. A railway can run for a long time on proforma grief. It can’t run safely on it. Astonishment is not a maintenance practice. Displeasure is not a penal action. A circular advising care is not an FIR. The shock will be worth something on the day it is followed by a consequence that lands on a vendor, or an officer, who has earned one. Until that day, the body count is not an accident.
It is the result !!!
The author is a retired senior railway officer.
Our coverage on the issues discussed:
“A Coach Broke in Two—The Real Crack Is in Rail Bhavan”
“A Fortnight of Failures, and a Board Too Busy to Read Them”
“WR: Glossy Posters vs. Grim Reality: The Mirage of Indian Railway ‘Progress’”
“Editorial: The Steel That Was Never There”
“Editorial: The Conceit of Process“
“Office Order 58 of 2016 has finally caught up with Indian Railways”