Sadism on the tracks: In Mumbai, commuters are treated as statistics, not humans

It is almost as if the suburban railway system in Mumbai is designed for disaster. The stampede at Elphinstone Road station on Friday that left 23 people dead was a tragedy waiting to happen because many pedestrian bridges and stairways on the system are narrow and hazardous.

It is as if the railways wants to punish commuters. It treats them not as customers but like cattle, whose movement needs to be controlled, confined.

That is evident the design of the Churchgate train terminus next to it, the biggest station on the city’s Western line. Rail travel anywhere in India is humiliating but it is worse and more unsafe at Churchgate station. Each working day, just over 5 lakh people use the facility from early morning till late in the night. For safety’s sake there should be multiple points of entry and exit. Far from it.

Humiliating journeys

But both entry and exit to Churchgate are a problem. The approach road, Maharshi Karve Road, is fenced off, as if it were a military garrison. And this the station that services a prime business district. If you are headed southwards to the state government headquarters of Mantralaya or the offices of Nariman Point, you have to walk through a very hot underground passage with blinding lights and dangerously hanging white bulbs, used by shops to display their wares in their subway stores. Everything in the city is designed for commerce, the motor car and the upper classes.

To enter Mumbai’s lifeline, the railway system, ordinary people are punished, made to go through a subterranean passage built so that cars can pass above them, unimpeded. In many other parts of the world, it’s the reverse: cars are made to drive through underground tunnels so that pedestrians are not hindered. In Mumbai, such blatant subjugation of public transport and common people goes on all the time.

As for bridges at railway stations across the system, they are narrow and poorly maintained. It is not just inefficiency but sadism at work. How else does one explain the fact that some of these bridges have been built to suffocate their users? One bridge at Dadar station in central Mumbai is enclosed on both sides with high walls. No ventilation and no visibility on either side. You just look in front of you and walk in a herd. One can imagine how a horse must feel with blinkers.

Elphinstone Road station, the site of Friday’s tragedy, is a focal point that serves as a link to Parel station on the Central Railway. It is widely used to cross over between the Central and Western lines. I have used it before and one reason why it is narrow is because this was, until relatively recently, a downmarket area.

This area will no doubt receive more attention now but not for ordinary people. It is already being heavily gentrified and has been singled out for development.

Inhuman machine at work

The problem arises because people are treated as statistics. The railways’ boast that it is transporting 7.5 million Mumbaikars daily may impress people elsewhere in India. But this is actually a rather inhuman machine at work. Transportation is seen mainly as an engineering exercise. The human side is totally lacking. Even the basic engineering and design are poor. One need only use the toilets at Churchgate station. They are so grossly inadequate and badly designed. The overflowing urinals are a demonstration of high incompetence – and located just a few metres away from the offices of the top management of the railways. A system that cannot design these basics cannot be relied upon to provide safe travel. No wonder we have seen so many mishaps in the last few months.

A railway public relations official declared some time ago in a television programme that their job is to move people, and that they cannot be bothered about other facilities. This is clearly the official policy of a heartless machine in operation.

I have been traveling on Mumbai’s trains for almost 50 years. I regularly commute between Bandra and Churchgate, a distance of 14 km that takes half an hour on a slow train. Though I have a first class monthly pass, I dread the journey. It is not so much the rush – I travel in off-peak hours – as the uncomfortable convex and concave seats. These are torturous. I always check with other commuters. They too realise these are uncomfortable but few care to protest.

It is amazing that with new technology available, ordinary design and engineering in the railways has become worse. Ergonomics, the science of relating technology to the human body, is something railway authorities have apparently not heard of.

Even the ordinary courtesy of a ramp is not provided at most stations, even in Mumbai. It would make walking with luggage so much easier. I have seen only one – on platform six at Dadar Central railway station.

Bullet trains over basics

The problem lies at the top. For the last few years, I have been attending the annual government conference on urban mobility. It is extremely elitist and far removed from actual problems. Officials are in self-congratulatory mode, displaying huge photographs of themselves at the venue. It is heavily dominated by engineers and most deliberations are highly technical. The human side is seriously lacking. Socio-economic problems receive little attention.

When socialist George Fernandes was railway minister in the Janata government in the late 1980s, he produced a working paper on the railways that suggested the transportation of commuters was no better than that of cattle in goods trains. Decades later, the situation seems to have worsened. Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said in Mumbai last month that the city’s suburban rail network was stuck in the 1980s. It is not a matter of decades. We have to contend with a mindset that goes further back in time, a primitive mindset that seeks to foist on us an utterly superfluous high-speed train between Mumbai and Ahmedabad at a cost of over Rs 1 lakh crore.

Unfortunately, this so-called progress comes at the cost of common people, depriving them of basic amenities. And the stampede at Elphinstone Road station shows people have been made beasts of sacrifice in the cause of such illusory progress.