Up to 50 feared dead in India train crash

Two trains derailed in India’s eastern state of Odisha on Friday, Indian news reports said, killing as many as 50 people and injuring hundreds more in an accident that deeply shook the country.

Amitabh Sharma, a spokesman for the railway ministry, was quoted by The Times of India as saying that 10 to 12 carriages of a train derailed and some of the debris then entered a nearby track where it was struck by another train.

Video footage from the scene of the crash showed panicked onlookers, and Indian news reports said 50 ambulances had arrived in the area, along with teams of doctors to tend to the injured. The number of dead was not confirmed, but reports feared it to be at least 50 people.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India expressed his condolences on Twitter. ‘Uneasy about the train accident in Odisha,’ he said wrote. “In this hour of grief, my thoughts are with the bereaved. May the injured recover quickly.”

India’s railways transport more than 13 million people a day, according to Indian Railways, but the system has been ravaged by years of neglect. In 2014, there were more than 27,000 train-related deaths, according to the country’s National Crime Records Bureau. In 2012, a committee appointed to assess the safety of the rail network cited “a grim picture of underperformance, largely due to poor infrastructure and resources”.

It recommended a host of urgent measures including improving track, repairing bridges, eliminating level crossings and replacing old carriages with safer carriages that better protect passengers in the event of an accident.

Passenger safety, or lack thereof, has come under scrutiny in India in recent years. In 2016, more than 140 passengers died in the nearby passenger car derailment the city of Kanpur. In the weeks following that accident, two more people were killed in another derailment of passenger coaches on the same stretch of track.