Train Safety is Compromised As This Barely Noticed Metric is Underfunded

New Delhi: In the flood of charges and counter charges after the derailment of the Hirakhand Express a tweet sent by Congress MP Ahmed Patel stood out.

Just what is the Railway Depreciation Fund? And why does cutting it by 60% have to be highlighted by Patel?

Put simply, the Depreciation Reserve Fund (DRF) is meant to finance the costs of replacing old assets with new. Railway infrastructure undergoes tremendous wear and tear and assets like rail track, bridges, wheels and coaches have to be constantly replaced in order to maintain rail safety.

But is there any evidence to back up Patel’s claim?

A PRS legislative Research note on Rail Budget 2016-17 says this: "In 2016-17, appropriation to the DRF has been reduced by 42% to Rs 3,200 crore. This means that Railways will spend Rs 3,200 crore on asset maintenance in 2016-17, as compared to Rs 7,775 and Rs 5,500 in 2014-15 and 2015-16 respectively. Under-provisioning for the DRF has been observed as one of the reasons behind the decline in track renewals, and procurement of wagons and coaches".

J.P. Batra, a former Chairman of the Railway Board told News18 in an interview that the stress on railway infrastructure is going up because traffic is rising, but the funds required to replace worn out assets is declining.

“Adequate funds out of the earnings of the current year have to be put into the DRF,” Batra told News18 in an interview.

“Although the real reasons for the train accidents cannot be ascertained without an inquiry it is a fact that while stress on the system is rising the funds to deal with it are falling,” he added.

A report in Firstpost says that close 45% of the accidents on Indian Railways since the start of this decade are due to derailments. Another 40% is due to unmanned rail road crossings. The two account for over 85 percent of the categories of the accidents in Indian Railways.

Batra makes a distinction between the ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ functions of the railways. Everything to do with train operations, including safety, falls under core. This makes the adequate provisioning of the DRF a necessity to avoid kind of accidents that led to the derailment of the Hirakhand express in Andhra Pradesh, killing 39 people.

"It is the duty of Railways to check the tracks on a regular basis and implement safety measures. Something has gone wrong. You can't have sabotage taken place every day," said Former Railways Minister Dinesh Trivedi told CNN-News18 in an interview.

There will be no separate railway budget this year as it has been merged into the general budget.

If the government wants to do something to address safety concerns it could start by allocating more money to the Depreciation Reserve Fund.