Balasore, Again | Part I: The Letter Sixty Days Before
Editorial Note: This is based on a whistle blower input. We urge Minister for Railways and Chairman/Railway Board to get matter examined. In case of clarification or any counter, we would prominently carry that clarification or rebuttal as the case may be.
Sixty days before Bahanaga Bazar the Railway Board listed five stations where the signal said one road and the point stood on another. It sent the list to every General Manager. On the night of 21 August 2023, a passenger train at Bondamunda took the wrong line under a green.
296 died, Prime Minister visited the site, Minister for Railways camped. This must have reminded—and we repeat it again—the Prime Minister of time when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat and he accompanied site of Sabarmati Express accident with then Railway Minister, Lalu Yadav in 2005. Both accidents had identical mode of failure, signal set on one line, points set on the other.
A green for one road, and the train on another
On the night of 21 August 2026 a passenger train at Bondamunda Link ‘C’ Cabin, Chakradharpur division, went where it had not been signalled to go.
The panel photograph reached us the same night.
Signal S23 stands green. Behind it the route sits set and locked over 105B and 105BXT. The red track, which means occupied, runs somewhere else entirely, coming up 105AXT and 105A, reaching 104B, crossing the 104 crossover and continuing into 104A and 104AXT.
Green for one road. Train moved on the other line over the crossover.
Nobody died, and that is precisely why you have not read about it anywhere else.
One promise, and only one
Interlocking makes a single promise. A signal shall not clear unless every point in its route stands correctly set, proved by detection, and locked for the movement. When it cannot prove that, it shall fall to red.
Read what the promise does not say. It does not say equipment will never fail. It says failure shall produce a red and never a green.
So a green over a wrongly set route is not a bad day at the office. It is the single outcome the architecture exists to make impossible.
Balasore, with the numbers changed
2 June 2023, Bahanaga Bazar. Up Home green for a run through on the Up main line. Crossover 17A/B standing to the loop. The Coromandel took the loop. A loaded goods train was already sitting on it.
296 dead.
The railway said it plainly on the first day, before the lawyers and the committees arrived. The joint inspection report, carried by ANI on 3 June 2023, recorded that the signal was given and taken off for the up main line for 12841, and that the train entered the loop line and struck the goods train standing there.
Signal for one road. Train on another. One sentence, written by the railway itself, inside twenty four hours of the collision, and it names the failure mode exactly as it would recur.
At Bahanaga Bazar the crossover carried the number 17A/B. At Bondamunda it carries 104A/B.
That is the only edit.
The Letter—Sixty days before
Now the part that should have ended careers.
On 3 April 2023 the Member (Infrastructure), Railway Board, R. N. Sunkar, wrote to every Zonal General Manager. He did not write in generalities, and he did not write about principles. He attached a list. Five cases, five stations, five dates, in a span of 54 days, in every one of which the point and the signal lamp were inconsistent.
Signal for one line. Point set to another.
This site published that letter with an image of its annexure on 14 October 2024, “Southern Railway Confirms that this is Balasore Type Accident”. The annexure is reproduced here from that page.
Read the heading the Board gave its own list.
“Unusual Occurrences – Adoption Short cut methods by Staff”
Now read what is under it—
Read the last column five times over. Correspondence not tested after the cables were repaired. Short cut by the signal maintainer. Point reconnected without ensuring proper housing. Wrong wiring in the relay room. Point reconnected without proper testing.
Not one of the five is an equipment failure.
Every one of the five is a disconnection, a reconnection or a test that was not done. The safeguard that failed each time is the correspondence test, which is the check that the point on the ground agrees with the point on the panel. That is the check the whole failsafe rests on.
Now look at case 4. Kharkopar, 28 February 2023. Wrong wiring done in a relay room during preparatory work for a commissioning. Change the station name and the date and you have the Commissioner of Railway Safety on Balasore, written seventeen months later.
The Board had the Balasore mechanism in front of it, on its own file, 94 days before Balasore.
And look at case 2. Hosadurga, 8 February 2023, train 12649 Sampark Kranti Express, points 64 and 65. That is the case the Principal Chief Operating Manager of South Western Railway wrote about the very next day, in a letter warning that this “contravenes the essence and basic principles of interlocking”, and that without correction it would bring recurrence and serious accidents.
So the field wrote to the zone on 9 February. The zone reached the Board. The Board wrote to every zone on 3 April. The distribution was complete, the dates are on the paper, and the mechanism is named in plain English.
Sixty days later the Coromandel Express entered the loop at Bahanaga Bazar.
The warning was not vague. It was not late.
Balasore happened anyway.
Then read the heading again
“Adoption Short cut methods by Staff”.
The Railway Board named this failure mode itself, counted it itself, dated it itself, and then filed the whole of it under the conduct of the men at the bottom.
Not one word about who refuses the traffic block that a correspondence test needs. Not one word about the pressure that turns a test into a short cut at 02:00. Not one word about who signs the disconnection notice and who wants the line back.
The men with the screwdrivers were blamed in the heading. The men who set the clock were not mentioned in it.
Then the mega drive
Give the railway its due.
After Balasore the Board did not sit still, and what followed was not a memo. It was a national drive, run from the Chairman’s chair, aimed at precisely this failure mode.
Relay rooms, relay huts at level crossings and point locations went under double lock. Cable connections were verified across the zones. Wiring was to be corrected, and circuit diagrams, Engineering Scale Plans and Station Working Rules were all to be brought back into agreement with the ground the Board had just discovered they no longer described. The then Chairman spent the better part of a year on that single task.
Nobody can say the railway did nothing. The railway did a great deal.
Now read what the drive found.
At the safety review of 3 November 2023, the one the Minister attended himself, the figures this site published showed Engineering Scale Plans that still did not match the yard. Platform levels wrong. Length of stabling line wrong. Class of level crossing gate out of step with the plan. Signalling maintenance pending. Collisions, signal passing at danger and derailments all rising. See “Safety of Railways—Who will bear the cross?”.
Five months after 296 people died because a drawing did not describe the site it claimed to describe, the railway’s own national review, sitting in front of its own Minister, found drawings that did not describe the site.
And then Bondamunda
Look at Figure 2 again. The panel carries a drawing number. SWRD No. TRD/CKP/SWR/15/2026. A 2026 issue. Which means that somebody, somewhere along that long chain of updated Station Working Rules that the drive set in motion, put a signature against this yard recently enough to still remember doing it.
So there is one question worth more than all the others. Does that drawing match the ground, wire for wire?
Because on the night of 21 August 2026 the panel said one thing and the ground did another. Again.
Three years after the letter that counted the cases. Three years after the drive that was supposed to close them.
The charge carries more weight
Concede the obvious. Bahanaga Bazar had a loaded goods train standing on the loop. Bondamunda did not, and that single fact is the whole distance between a near miss and a national tragedy.
It was not vigilance, it was not the drive that ran for a year out of the Chairman’s office, and it was not the twenty one thousand route kilometres of Kavach now under way.
It was luck.
What has to happen now
Treat #Bondamunda at par with #BNBR. A near miss of this class is investigated as an accident by every railway that means what it says about safety.
Then fix responsibility from Headquarters down to the Division, on serving officers and on those who have moved on. The letter of 3 April 2023 went to every General Manager, so ask each of those offices what it did with the letter, what the drive actually verified inside its own jurisdiction, and who signed to say so.
An interlocking does not rot in a single night, and the men who watched it rot have mostly been promoted since.
The Member (Infrastructure) did his duty. He counted the cases, he listed the stations, he named the failure in every one, he sent the letter to every General Manager, and he marked it to the DG/Safety.
Sixty days later 296 people died of the thing he had described.
So who is in a position to prevent the next one? #RailSafety #IndianRailways
Coming in this series
Part II. Curse of Secrecy-The Demonstration Nobody Was Allowed to Read. In 2018 the railway’s own signal engineers proved to the Commissioner of Railway Safety that a panel can be made to lie about a point. The proof went into a confidential file.
Part III. Curse of promoting incompetence-Nobody Was Ever Promoted for being Correct & Competent. Not one of the five cases was an equipment failure. Every one was a test that was not done.
Further reads on this site
13 June 2025: Accident Reports—That of Air & Rail
14 October 2024: The Member (Infra) letter of 3 April 2023 and its annexure, with the 2018 Tangani record from the CRS
5 November 2023: Safety of Railways—Who will bear the cross?
11 July 2023: The Vande Bharat fiasco and the choked arteries of the nation’s lifeline
14 June 2023: Why talk of Kavach is not just Meaningless it is acceptance of complete failure of IR’s top management
22 August 2026: #Railwhispers on the Bondamunda panel, eleven posts on X,
References outside this site
11 June 2023: Balasore train accident: Railway Board orders double-locking arrangements for signalling assets, Business Today.
3 June 2023: Odisha train accident: Official flagged ‘serious flaws in signalling system’ in February, ThePrint.
3 June 2023: The joint inspection report on the Balasore accident, ANI.