Scores Die as Train in India Derails

Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press

Twelve cars derailed on a train bound for New Delhi on Sunday,
killing dozens of people.

By LYDIA POLGREEN

Published: July 10, 2011

NEW DELHI — Scores of people were killed and more than 100 were injured when more than a dozen cars of a train headed for the capital derailed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh on Sunday.
Television news footage from the site of the crash showed rail cars jumbled atop one another and gouged with deep gashes. The train, known as the Kalka Mail, derailed about 75 miles from Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
Rescue workers, aided by the Indian Army, struggled to pull survivors from the wreckage.
“It is so badly mangled,” Harish Chandra Joshi, a senior railway official, told NDTV, a private television news station, describing the effort to rescue several trapped passengers. “Anything you try to lift off, the pressure is put on the bodies.”
Railway officials put the death toll at 31 on Sunday, but that number was expected to rise.
India’s vast railway network is a transportation lifeline for the country’s 1.2 billion people, allowing them to travel long distances at very low fares by global standards. The 150-year-old system operates nearly 10,000 trains a day and with more than a million employees, it is the country’s largest employer.
A series of deadly incidents, including one in 2010 that killed more than 150 people in West Bengal, has raised concerns that India’s railways are increasingly unsafe. Its aging infrastructure is badly in need of modernization, experts say, particularly outdated safety equipment.
For the past two years the West Bengal politician Mamata Banerjee was India’s railway minister, but she focused much of her energy on an ultimately successful campaign to unseat India’s Communist Party from her home state, leading to criticism that the railways deteriorated during her tenure.