Balasore rail crash a reality check for Modi govt

Union Minister for Railways, Telecom and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw was briefing the media about nine years of Modi government at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi at 4 pm on Friday. He briefed with the thoroughness of a bureaucrat with a technological background. The first third of the briefing was about railways, and Vaishnaw literally boasted about the top slot that Indian railways were occupying in the world—one of the top eight, to be precise—which run trains like Vande Bharat with a speed range of 180 kmph. He said that there were export orders for Vande Bharat trains, and India would be exporting them once the domestic production of 200 Vande Bharat trains was reached. Then he explained the sophisticated technology involved in the running of the Vande Bharat with its extraordinary ensemble of chips—30,000 of them. He did not anticipate, and it was no fault of his, that about two hours later, far away from Delhi, near the Balasore railway station in Odisha, there would occur the worst train crash in 20 years. In retrospect, the crash is a tragic reality check for the Modi government, which has been in a perpetual self-congratulatory mode for all the nine years it has been in office.

While it is natural for a government to sing of its achievements and showcase them, it is evident that the Modi government has been caught on the wrong foot because it has neglected the railway system as a whole. Modi has been focusing on making Indian railways sleek and fast, a dream he carried even before he became prime minister in 2014. One of his dream projects was a bullet train like the ones that run in Japan, and they have been running there for more than half a century. So, when he became prime minister and the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe came to the country, a plan was drawn up for a bullet train to run between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, and it was to be a collaboration with the Japanese because the Japanese are the masters of bullet trains. When he was asked about the bullet train at the media briefing, Vaishnaw was quite sheepish in saying that the work on the project was moving. The Vande Bharat trains seem to be a poor substitute for the real speed monster, the bullet train.

The collision of three trains near Balasore pointed to the fact that traffic management dipped on the fateful Friday evening. And initial information seems to suggest, and it was confirmed by Vaishnaw, that there was a mess-up in the electronic signalling. It is then a matter of technological glitches, and it has less to do with human error.

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Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had visited the crash site, said that those responsible for the mishap would get stringent punishment. And Vaishnaw went on to say that the investigation would be handed over to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). The prime minister and the railways minister were truly flustered, and they did not have a clue as to what went wrong.

If it was a technological glitch and there was a snag in the electronic signalling, what is needed is a team of engineers, especially electronic engineers, to investigate the crash and find out what went wrong. An investigation by the CBI would be anachronistic if nothing else.

This being an election year, Modi and Vashnaw will have to find the wrongdoers and punish them, even if the culprit is faceless technology. The two are great worshippers of everything technical. Vaishnaw was a student of electronics, and Modi’s vision of a self-reliant India hinges on technology, from tax administration to running trains to flying planes and tracking the billion plus people of the country. The prime minister displays the naïve faith that machines can do no wrong. He does not seem to understand that machines are prone to dysfunction and that there is a need for a larger, more skilled work force to manage the machines.

The Balasore train mishap is a perfect example of what is wrong with Modi’s approach to governing the country. He is much too focused on doing flashy things, and he loves the tech glitz. He thinks that he will solve India’s economic, political, and social problems with technological solutions. He is not willing to factor in the possibilities of things going wrong and keep emergency plans in place. This would require a closer scrutiny of the technical systems that are being put in place for various aspects of the country’s life and the need to create fall-back alternatives. This is a job that neither Modi nor Vaishnaw can do. They have to create not just the digital infrastructure to run India, but they also have to provide the emergency teams that will deal with glitches. If there is a problem with the electronic signalling, as appears to be the case at Balasore, then there must be engineers on hand to take over the manual handling of the system. The signal cabins, which are to be found on either end of railway stations, might look antediluvian, but they may be needed after all to keep disasters at bay.

Read | CBI team visits Odisha train accident site, begins probe

The lesson from the Balasore tragedy that Modi and Vaishnaw have to learn is this: It is irresponsible to be starry-eyed about technology. This does not mean that we become Luddites and spurn technology. It means that we need to double-check technology much more thoroughly. We need people to do this. Modi must give up his tech romanticism and get real about gadgets and the systems that make them work. We are aware that Modi is not too comfortable dealing with people, and he prefers mechanised systems because they do not talk back or differ with the leader. He has to recognise that technology is created by people, and as people are fallible, machines too are fallible. Modi’s messianic complex gets in the way. He is not willing to accept that he can be wrong, and so can many around him.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based political commentator)