📰 Navy gets amphibious landing craft
It can transport troops, attack tanks
•The second Landing Craft Utility L52 of Mk-IV class, an amphibious ship to transport combat equipment and troops of the Navy, designed and built by Garden Reach Ship Builders, was commissioned at Port Blair on Monday.
•These ships would be based in the Andaman and Nicobar Command and can be deployed for multi-role activities such as beaching operations, search and rescue, disaster relief operations, supply and replenishment and evacuation from distant islands.
•The ship, commanded by Commander Kaushik Chatterjee, has a complement of five officers and 46 sailors.
•The ship is capable of carrying 160 troops in addition. Displacing 830 tonnes, it is capable of transporting various kinds of combat equipment such as Arjun main battle tanks.
📰 China to relaunch one of world’s fastest bullet trains
1,250-km trip from Beijing to Shanghai in 4 hours, 30 minutes
•After cutting back the speed of the Beijing to Shanghai bullet train following a deadly crash, China is set to again make it one of the world’s fastest.
•New generation trains will service the route starting next month, making the 1,250-km journey from the capital to Shanghai in just 4 hours, 30 minutes.
•The latest trains were unveiled in June and have a top speed of 400 kmph.
•China first ran trains at 350 kmph in August 2008, but cut speeds back to 250 – 300 kmph in 2011 following a train collision near the city of Wenzhou that killed 40 people and injured 191.
•China has laid more than 20,000 km of high-speed rail, with a target of adding another 10,000 km by 2020.
•China has spent an estimated $360 billion on high-speed rail, building by far the largest network in the world.
📰 Drones on a mission to restore Myanmar’s mangrove cover
Six of them can ‘plant up to one lakh trees per day’ and cut cost by nearly half
•Fast-dwindling mangroves in Myanmar’s low-lying Ayeyarwady Delta, ravaged by decades of deforestation and conversion of land for agriculture and aquaculture, could find an unlikely saviour — drones.
•Mangroves protect coastlines in the face of storms and rising sea levels, absorb carbon from the atmosphere, and boost fish stocks, experts say.
•Yet Myanmar has lost more than 1 million hectares (about 2.5 million acres) of mangroves since 1980, said Arne Fjortoft, founder and secretary-general of Worldview International Foundation (WIF), which has worked with two local universities to restore mangroves in the Southeast Asian nation since 2012.
Dwindling green cover
•In the delta region, known as the country’s rice bowl, only 16% of original mangrove cover remains, Mr. Fjortoft told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by e-mail.
•There is an “urgent need” to restore mangroves to stem saltwater invasion of farmland and shoreline erosion due to sea level rise, as well as to protect lives and property from storms and floods in coastal areas, he added.
•An annual climate risk index by Germanwatch, a green research group, ranked Myanmar — which suffered decades of military rule — second among the 10 countries worst-affected by extreme weather from 1996 to 2015.
•WIF has so far planted some 3 million mangrove trees, but the task is laborious and time-consuming.
•Drones, on the other hand, could plant trees 10 times faster and cut costs by half, according to UK-based start-up BioCarbon Engineering (BCE), whose CEO is an ex-NASA engineer who worked on the search for life on Mars.
•Once the process is fully automated, a single pilot operating six drones can plant up to 100,000 trees per day, BCE says.
•In late July, the inaugural BridgeBuilder Challenge, which awards $1 million in prize money for ideas with global impact, selected as one of its winners a proposal by BCE and WIF to test the use of BCE’s drones to plant a million mangroves in Myanmar.
Training locals
•The plan covers 250 hectares and involves training and employing locals to collect and prepare seeds, as well as to maintain, monitor and protect the fragile ecosystems.
•It still requires approval from Myanmar’s authorities, but Bremley Lyngdoh, a WIF board member who is applying for further grants, is hopeful work could start later this year. “We don’t want another big storm to come and destroy a lot of lives and livelihoods like in 2008,” said Mr. Lyngdoh, referring to Cyclone Nargis which devastated the Ayeyarwady Delta region, killing nearly 140,000 people.
•Drones are particularly useful in complicated or dangerous terrain that is hard for people to access, said Irina Fedorenko, a co-founder of BCE. They can help cover large areas of land very fast, and could contribute to meeting the international community’s commitment to restore 350 million hectares of degraded forests and agricultural land by 2030, she said. That goal will be near impossible without technology and innovation, she added.
•Experts say thriving mangrove ecosystems can store two to four times more carbon than most other tropical forests, helping reduce planet-warming gases in the atmosphere, while slowing coastal erosion and shielding communities against tsunamis and storm surges.
•They also provide breeding grounds for fish and other sea creatures. Mangroves have been estimated to support 30 percent of Southeast Asia’s fish catch, and almost 100 percent of its shrimp catch.
•Yet they are being destroyed at rates three to five times higher than global deforestation, a 2014 U.N. report warned.
How it works
•BCE’s technology, which works in two phases, aims to change that.
•First, drones flying 100 metres (328 ft) above the ground take highly detailed, 3D images of the land while sensors record information such as soil type, soil quality and moisture. The data is then used to create a planting pattern, pinpointing the best spots and species to plant in each location.
•Then a drone uploaded with the mapping information flies 2 metres above the ground, shooting biodegradable seed pods designed to enhance germination success. A drone carrying 300 seed pods can cover 1 hectare in 18 minutes, according to BCE. Mr. Fedorenko said BCE had tested around 3,000 species of plants in different conditions, including in Britain and in Australia, and was confident of finding the right combination for Myanmar.
📰 Doklam standoff will be resolved soon: Rajnath
China is also inclined towards a solution, says Home Minister
•The ongoing standoff between the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Indian Army at Doklam near the Bhutan-Sikkim-China trijunction was termed a “deadlock” by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh on Monday.
•He said the crisis, which has been going on for two months, will be resolved soon and “China is also inclined towards it [finding a solution].”
•Mr. Singh made the statement at a pipping ceremony of Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) jawans posted along the China border. Later speaking on the sidelines of the function, Mr. Singh told reporters: “We expect a positive move from China soon.”
“Deviant” incident
•A senior Home Ministry official told The Hindu that the August 15 skirmish near the Pangong Tso Lake in Ladakh, in which soldiers from the two armies kicked, punched and threw stones at each other, was a “deviant” incident.
•Lt. Gen. (Retired) Prakash Katoch first shared a video clip of the brawl on August 19. An official said an inquiry was under way to find the “source” of the video.
📰 China wants to go back to ‘1959 LAC’
Accuses India of ‘violent actions’
•China on Monday urged India to abide by the Line of Actual Control (LAC) position of 1959, following last week’s scuffle between troops of the two countries along the Pangong lake in Ladakh.
•To a question, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying accused Indian troops of undertaking “violent actions” and injuring Chinese personnel.
•The Ministry urged India to abide by the “1959 LAC” — an apparent reference to the alignment espoused by former Chinese Premier Zhou en Lai in a letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. In his 2016 book, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy , former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon points out that in the proposal of November 1959, the Chinese describe the LAC “only in general terms on maps not to scale”. India rejected the proposal in 1959 and 1962.
•Zhou en Lai then wrote to Nehru that in the eastern sector, the line “coincides in the main with the so-called McMahon Line, and in the western and middle sectors, it coincides in the main with the traditional customary line which has consistently been pointed out by China”.
•Ms. Hua said the incident at Pangong lake had “violated the consensus” on border issues. She said China had expressed “grave dissatisfaction” and lodged its serious concern with India.
📰 Rebooting India-Nepal ties
Indian interventionism having backfired, the Nepal PM’s visit is an opportunity to raise the level of bilateral ties
•Nepal is run by a revolving door of political leaders who have weakened the polity and economy over the years, but who did battle the odds to promulgate a new Constitution. India, meanwhile, has a Chief Minister-turned-Prime Minister who has had to learn geopolitics on the job. Prime Minister Narendra Modi would have realised the limits of optics in geopolitics, and Nepal serves as a marker of adventurism gone awry.
•With global geopolitics on the boil, and the Hindi-Chini relationship in free fall, it should be in India’s interest to secure its own neighbourhood, and that can only be through letting national politics and governance of the smaller neighbours evolve without interference.
Impediments, implausibilities
•New Delhi must use the visit of Nepal’s newly anointed Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, on Wednesday as an opportunity to hit the reset button on Nepal-India relations. Such a rebooting requires a cold and hard look at how Nepal was handled over the past decade, exemplified by the impediments placed in the writing, adoption and implementation of the Constitution.
•True, India played a valued role in ending the Maoist insurgency in 2006, but the period thereafter was marked by escalating micro-meddling in Nepal’s internal affairs. In Constitution-writing, there were attempts to define the new provincial boundaries according to Indian dictates — pushing first an unwieldy and unworkable plains-only province, then a two-province formula.
•The presence of India’s heavy hand contributed in numerous ways to the distortion of consensual governance needed in transitional times. Kathmandu’s civil society was preoccupied with managing the fallout, and much time has been spent rallying around the flag rather than stabilising the new republican democracy, trying to end ‘bhagbanda’ share-the-spoils politics, and working to ensure that the inclusion enshrined in the Constitution is observed in practice. (The scarcity of Madhesi faces in the recent appointment of ambassadors, judges and government appointments is a case in point.)
•For reasons best known to South Block, India ‘noted’ rather than welcomed the Constitution. A society trying to emerge from the April 2015 Great Earthquake was slapped with the punitive Great Blockade. Even today, New Delhi seems uneasy with the recognition of Maithili, Bhojpuri and Avadhi in Nepal, and prefers the elevation of Hindi as in India.
•While keeping silent for years on Nepal’s post-conflict transitional justice process, in November 2015 India’s representative in Geneva cynically utilised the forum of the Human Rights Council to influence government change in Kathmandu. A year ago, Indian interlocutors pushed the Nepali Congress to renege on its promise to continue in coalition with the mainstream left Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), and engineered what is the implausible current embrace of the Congress with the Maoist party of Pushpa Kamal Dahal.
•At the tactical level, New Delhi’s motives behind the heavy-handedness of the recent past may have to do with electoral calculations related to the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh polls. On the Constitution, the idea of a ‘buffer’ province is thought to have been floated either to prevent third country militant infiltration or to control national-level politics in Kathmandu. Some point to an agenda to try to take Nepal back to ‘Hindu state’ constitutional status.
•For the long term, Indian strategists may be seeking ways to get Kathmandu to allow the construction of high dams and deep reservoirs on Nepal’s rivers — for flood control, navigation, urban use and irrigation in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. A particular federal demarcation might make Kathmandu more amenable, goes this line of thinking.
•In trying to push some or all of these goals, New Delhi made deep inroads into Nepal’s political class, but none did it use more than the Madhesbaadi parties. Besides the fact that this has done great injustice to the plains-based Madhesi citizens of Nepal, the Madhesbaadi leadership is presently incensed that after all its goading New Delhi now seems to be backtracking — a recent example of this ‘use and throw’ policy is seen in how the Madhesbaadi leaders were made to stand against local government elections, followed by a volte-face of the Indian Embassy urging them to join.
•As Mr. Deuba deplanes, indeed there are indications of a scaling back of Indian involvement. Hopefully this is a response to a growing realisation in New Delhi that a peaceful, stable Nepal that evolves of its own volition is good for India, and especially for the central Ganga plains.
•From the Kathmandu perspective, politically micromanaging Nepal could not have but backfired. Take the Great Blockade, which forced the Kathmandu political leadership to reach out to Beijing and sign a slew of trade, transit and infrastructural agreements with it. Few know that Nepal is today better connected by air to Chinese cities than to India.
Pending matters
•Once Nepal and India get past the era of interventionism as but a bad memory, the two can concentrate on the numerous matters that need concentration and resolution. An important issue is the open border itself, which is a unique joint heritage of the two countries. While it is Nepal’s Left that has traditionally demanded restrictions on the border, the call now rises from the Indian security establishment.
•As we speak, the Nepal plains are suffering from massive floods that have also affected downstream areas across the border. Besides the spread of settlements, a prime cause for the severity is that the Chure (Shivalik) hills have been gouged of rocks to build elevated roads and levees just south of the border, leading to inundation in Nepal. A permanent bilateral mechanism is required to save the plains population of Nepal from suffering, which is ongoing as this is written.
•The Kosi Barrage and attendant embankments have the possibility of wreaking havoc because siltation of six decades has raised the riverbed within the levees far above the outlying tracts. The easy answer for the Indian politician is to demand a high dam in the hills of Nepal even as alternatives are not studied, such as redistribution of waters into various older channels of the Kosi in Bihar.
•There are many other matters pending between Nepal and India, much of it due to neglect by the Kathmandu intelligentsia, such as regarding the impact of demonetisation and the application of Goods and Services Tax on Nepal’s economy and citizenry. Similarly, Kathmandu prefers not to discuss the fact that the Nepali rupee is pegged to the Indian rupee and what it means for the long run. The rights of migrant Indian labour in Nepal and Nepali labour in India is a topic that rarely comes up. There are border disputes pending between the two countries — at Susta, Kalapani and the ‘tri-junction’ of Lipulekh — but Kathmandu has been timid in raising these matters.
•Nepal has since long planned to sell electricity to India once it has a hydropower surplus, and the completion of the much-delayed Dhalkebar-Muzaffarpur transmission line was supposed to facilitate that. But along comes an Indian government directive that it will not allow import of electricity other than from power companies with more than 51% Indian equity.
•The arbitrary blockages and go-slow at Indian Customs at border points, the selective use of quarantine for the export of Nepali agricultural produce, the increasing high-handedness of the Sashastra Seema Bal (India’s frontier force in this sector) in dealing with Nepalis crossing over — these are only some of the other challenges on the bilateral plane.
•Due to domestic political instability more than anything else, over the years Kathmandu lost its confidence in dealing with the Dilli Durbar. With the self-assurance that comes from Nepal moving towards normalcy under its new Constitution, and with India seemingly changing gears on its Nepal policy, one hopes for a threshold of maturity in relations between South Asia’s oldest nation-state and its largest democracy.
📰 Supreme Court to deliver verdict on triple talaq today
To rule if law violates human rights
•A five-judge Supreme Court Bench, headed by Chief Justice of India J.S. Khehar, will on Tuesday pronounce its judgment on the legality of the Islamic personal law practice of triple talaq .
•The court will decide if the law, which allows a Muslim man to divorce his wife by saying talaq (divorce) thrice, violates the fundamental and human rights of Muslim women.
•On October 16, 2015, the court questioned if Muslim personal law practices of marriage and divorce reduce women to chattels. In a rare move, it registered a suo motu PIL petition to examine if arbitrary divorce, polygamy and nikah halalaviolate women’s dignity.
Missed opportunities
•It rued the missed opportunity to address gender inequality in both the Shah Bano and Danial Latifi cases. In the Shah Bano case, it had merely goaded the government to frame the Uniform Civil Code.
📰 Now, passport sans police verification
CCTNS data for applicants’ credentials
•The physical police verification for getting a passport may soon be dispensed with as the Centre plans to connect the procedure with the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and Systems Project (CCTNS), a project first conceptualised by the UPA government in 2009.
•Union Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi said the CCTNS, an exhaustive national database of crimes and criminals that will check the antecedents of applicants at the click of a mouse, was expected to be linked with the passport service of the External Affairs Ministry.
National database
•“Police in some states are already using CCTNS for passport credentials. Police will be given handheld devices to go to an applicant’s address and his or her details will be uploaded on the network. It will minimise contact of an individual with police and reduce time (for getting passport),” Mr. Mehrishi told presspersons.
•Mr. Mehrishi was speaking after Home Minister Rajnath Singh launched the CCTNS project, which aims to connect the country’s all 15,398 police stations.
•He said the mandate of the CCTNS had been expanded by incorporating citizen-centric services such as tenant verification, which could be done with the consent of the person being verified, quick registration of FIR in any crime and connecting the network with criminal justice delivery system.
•Asked about the safety of the database, the Home Secretary said possibility of hacking was always there but enough safeguards had been put in place and the National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre had been roped in for the task.
•The Home Minister said the digital police portal would provide citizens facilities for online complaint registration and request for antecedent verification. “The police portal will provide 11 searches and 46 reports from the national database for state police and central investigation agencies. Central investigating and research agencies have also been provided logins to the digital police database to access crime statistics,” Mr. Singh said.
•Mr. Singh said the CCTNS has enabled 13,775 out of 15,398 police stations to enter 100 per cent data into the software. He said as of now the CCTNS national database has around 7 crore data records pertaining to past and current criminal cases. The project will interconnect about 15,398 police stations and 5,000 offices of supervisory police officers across the country.
📰 Will SC end personal laws’ immunity?
Verdict may settle debate on whether or not these can be brought within the ambit of Article 13
•The Supreme Court’s judgment on the constitutionality of triple talaq may also decide the age-old debate whether personal laws can be brought under the ambit of Article 13 (laws inconsistent with or in derogation of the fundamental rights) of the Constitution.
•While the All India Muslim Personal Law Board ( AIMPLB) has argued that the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction to strike down provisions of personal law, organisations calling for reform and Muslim women from various walks of life across the country have urged the court to declare triple talaq and polygamy as “un-Islamic”.
•This is the first time that aggrieved persons — individual Muslim women — themselves have approached the apex court in person to settle the law on whether religious law is immune from constitutional standards enshrined under fundamental rights.
•Article 13 includes in its ambit any “ordinance, order, by-law, rule, regulation, notification and even customs and usages” passed or made by the Legislature or any other “competent authority”. It mandates that any law in force in the country before or after the commencement of Constitution should not violate the fundamental rights of citizens enshrined in Part III.
•A judicial declaration from a Constitution Bench under Article 13 that personal laws are liable to comply with the fundamental rights guaranteed by Constitution would bring religious law, even uncodified practices, under judicial review.
Discordant notes
•In the past, courts have made discordant notes about the immunity enjoyed by personal laws.
•In 1951, the Bombay High Court in State of Bombay versus Narasu Appa Mali held that personal law is not ‘law’ under Article 13. The judgment was never challenged in the Supreme Court.
•In Ahmedabad Women Action Group versus Union of India , the Supreme Court was asked to consider that unilateral divorce by talaq and polygamy violated Articles 14 and 15. The court rejected the claim, saying it was for the legislature to determine. Whether this Constitution Bench will resolve the age-old dispute or leave it to the legislature to decide is to be seen.
📰 Triple talaq lost staunchest support
As the case winds to a close, AIMPLB has swung to a view against the practice
•In the past two years of litigation over the legality of instant triple talaq, the Supreme Court has seen a climbdown in the position of Muslim bodies, from declaring that the practice helps estranged couples to “move on” effortlessly to filing finally an affidavit that Muslim men who resort to instant talaq will be socially boycotted.
•In September 2016, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) argued that the Shariat permitted instant talaq in the interest of both the man and woman as a means to keep their dignity and privacy intact.
•The intention is to save the family from delayed justice in conventional courts and to avoid mud-slinging in public.
•“To presume that each triple talaq is arbitrary and unreasonable is a fallacy of reason ... it is a misconception that triple talaq is always a result of haste and is a power which is freely misused by a Muslim male,” the Board had told the court.
•It had justified that there were “innumerable instances where a Muslim wife seeks dissolution of marriage and approaches her husband seeking immediate dissolution by resorting to triple talaq”.
Judicial legislation
•The Board had argued that a religion cannot be “reformed” out of its existence or identity. It had accused the Supreme Court of trying to indulge in judicial legislation in the name of “socially reforming” Islamic practices of marriage and divorce.
•Getting rid of the “peculiarities” of Islamic personal law will be akin to enforcing the Uniform Civil Code by judicial process, Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, a prominent Islamic organisation, had told the Supreme Court.
•However, one of the judges on the Constitution Bench, Justice Kurian Joseph, towards the end of the hearing, had suggested whether Muslim brides can be armed with a right to forbid instant talaq in the nikah namah .
•However, the AIMPLB, on the last day of the hearing, conveyed its resolution to boycott Muslims who pronounced divorce in one go. “This social will be much helpful in decreasing the incidents of divorce,” the AIMPLB had assured the court.
📰 Recasting the steel frame
The bureaucracy needs to embrace lateral entry, technology, and the ‘perform or perish’ culture
•It is impossible to run a 21st century economy with a 19th century bureaucracy using 18th century rules. The “New India” that is under way also needs independence from bad bureaucracy, not necessarily from all bureaucracy, for any state would need to be run by some set of rules, by some set of people — call them by any name you wish. The minute you say banish all bureaucracy, there will begin a chorus claiming nepotism, politicisation, lack of transparency and accountability, and the need for an umpire and a strong catalyst of change — which is what the higher civil service ought to be in the first place.
•The civil services need to bring about three fundamental changes, some of which are already under way under the new dispensation. First, specific clauses under All India Services and Central Services Conduct Rules have been invoked to sack officers on grounds of incompetence and/or corruption. The rules always existed in the rule book but this government has had the courage to use it in public interest and more will follow soon. The black sheep should be identified and sent home, with public opprobrium.
Lateral entry
•Second, lateral entry into the higher civil services should be welcomed but with some caveats. Espousing lateral entry as a manna for all failures of governance will only set it up to fail, for history is replete with examples of some of the most accomplished private sector professionals failing inside government. Let’s not forget that Hasmukh Adhia who delivered the Goods and Services Tax, Parameswaran Iyer who manages sanitation, Aruna Sundararajan who gave us Digital India, Sanjay Mitra who delivered highways, S. Jaishankar who places India on the global map, Anil Swarup who led coal auctions, Rita Teaotia who led GEM (government e-marketplace) and preferential procurement for “Make in India” products, each along with their respective team of civil servants from various services, and the entire leadership of Prime Minister’s Office who oversee and catalyse all the above, did not come into government through lateral entry. Conversely, lateral entry has also produced a pilot who was designated Cabinet Secretary in a State who then ran amok, and thoughtful economists who were disasters as leaders inside government.
•It is highly unlikely that a private sector professional will view civil services as a ‘career’ for, say, 10-15 years given the modest compensation and significant ecosystem issues which often mitigate against measurable inputs and outcomes. Earlier the ‘ lal batti ’ (red beacon) used to be one fatal attraction but now that’s also gone. Whether they would want to break their heads working with the many inscrutable gems and political dynasties of corruption and non-performance spread across parties, at the national and State levels, remains to be seen.
•Lateral entry does open the risk and prospect of powerful corporate groups placing their men in key positions of government. However, when one looks at the serious lack of decision-making abilities or willingness in some of the government’s senior leadership, as also the existing allegiances of some in the system with groups outside government, on balance, lateral entry is indeed a necessary condition of good governance.
•Alongside introducing lateral entry, there is a need to “put to pasture” those due to whom administrative rigor mortis has set in — if someone is not found suitable in the IAS/IRS/IPS/IFS after about 15 years, i.e. at the Joint Secretary level, shift them out to non-crucial posts or give them their lifetime pension today and send them home now.
Harnessing technology
•The third big step should be to infuse more and more technology into every touch point where a citizen interacts with the government. Today with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), global technology leaders such as IPsoft use virtual assistants to deliver citizens services in the U.K. and U.S. In the context of government service delivery, cognitive intelligence can deliver it with greater superiority, accuracy, consistency and at lower cost than humans can. The time is ripe for introducing AI in government services such as passports, licences, building permits, certificates, etc. where it can communicate in natural language with citizens and ensure process compliance.
•At 70, India needs independence from bad bureaucracy and inane processes and meaningless forms — not necessarily from “good” bureaucracy, which in every country, system and time has been the harbinger of positive change.
📰 Derailed priorities
There must be a quick inquiry into the Khatauli accident, and a larger safety upgrade
•Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu took several Rail Bhawan mandarins to task within hours of the latest tragedy on the tracks. Thirteen coaches of the Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express derailed at Khatauli, near Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh, killing at least 23 people. A portion of the track had been disjointed and was being welded in order to be put back in place as part of ‘routine maintenance’. But no one bothered to put a traffic blockade in place, as required, and the welding could not be completed before the train passed through. A probe by the Commissioner of Railway Safety may reveal whether this was a systemic communication failure or an instance of a casual approach to a task that needed to be done but could have waited if traffic blocks were not feasible that day. Reposing confidence in the inquiry process may appear difficult as the CRS is yet to conclude its investigation into one of the deadliest railway mishaps in the past decade: the Indore-Patna Express crash near Kanpur last November, that killed 152 passengers. That process may have been muddied by suggestions of sabotage, from the highest levels of government, and accountability is yet to be fixed. But in Khatauli, evidence is available of serious lapses, including an audio recording of railway officers conceding bungling over the maintenance work.
•Two engineers have been suspended, another has been transferred, and three top officials, including a Railway Board member in charge of engineering and tracks, have been asked to go on leave as ‘exemplary punishment’. Action against Railway Board members is rare, and this sends out a strong signal. However, it is no substitute for a larger course correction. Nearly 70% of the 303 rail accidents reported between 2012-13 and 2015-16 were caused by carelessness of railway staff, which includes shortcuts in maintenance work and failure to heed safety norms. Derailments — often caused by defects in the tracks or the rolling stock — have been the second biggest reason for accidents and casualties over the past decade. The Railways has over 1.14 lakh km of tracks, but their renewal, the Ministry told the Parliamentary Committee on Railways, depends on the financial resources allotted in a given year rather than the length of tracks that need refreshing. The induction of coaches with anti-climbing features, that could minimise fatalities in incidents like Khatauli, remains far too sluggish. A five-year corporate safety plan, first announced in the Rail Budget for 2015-16, has been drafted, but is yet to be approved. Humans err, but when the system turns a blind eye to the obvious needs of a public utility, the wake-up call needs to go beyond rapping a few officers. As the Railways itself has said, unless operations are safe, there are no operations.
