Monday 2 October 2017

Elphinstone Road: An Inevitable Tragedy

They are often touted as Mumbai's lifeline, as these suburban trains bring millions of commuters from suburbs as far as 60-70 kilometres to their offices and businesses located in the central business district. But it has also been a reason for grief to many as death and injury lurks at every step while these trains go about their humongous and unwieldy daily grind of gorging and disgorging thousands of passengers at various stations.

Nearly 8-10 commuters die on a daily basis while boarding or alighting the coaches, which are crammed four times their capacity, or while crossing the tracks. But these deaths rarely rise above being a mere statistic. And we all shrug it off saying life is cheap! The only time the death in trains become 'breaking news' is when there is a bomb blast or if a certain gentleman from across the border decides to do some target practice at one of these stations.

However on Friday the city and the country were jolted out of its festive Ayudha Pooja stupor by a stampede in Elphinstone Road station, a low profile mill district which of late has metamorphosed into a corporate hub.

For those not familiar with Mumbai suburban rail network, the city has three rail lines - Western, Central and Harbour. Western and Central lines intersect at two points and Elphinstone Road on the Western line is one of the options for commuters to change to Central line, as it is linked to nearby Parel station on the Central line by a foot overbridge.

The other option is Dadar station which has platforms catering to both the railway lines. However, the volume of crowd at Dadar is far too intimidating and it calls for the strength, aggressiveness and endurance of a rugby player to board and alight trains.

Its too early to find the actual reason for this calamity and newspapers are still flush with 'eyewitness' accounts and political slanging matches played, often on social media with hashtag jousts.

From the newspaper accounts it appears that Elphinstone Road and Parel stations continue to be interconnected with a lone overbridge that is barely eight feet wide and was built decades ago when these two stations were catering to a fraction of the commuters they handle now.

This is despite the fact that the transformation of Elphinstone Road and Lower Parel as an extended central business district has been a work in progress since mid 1990s. Those were the early days of gentrification of mill districts and I remember when a well known advertising agency shifted its office from upscale Nariman Point to Lower Parel, it was acutely coy about the down market location of its new premises and mentioned it as 'Worli East' in its invitation.

However, the Railways remained oblivious to large scale shifting of corpoate offices to these areas, most of them in order to cut costs, or the burgeoning number of skyscrapers being built to accommodate them. The rising number of office goers and the resulting congestion in these stations no way stirred them from their Rip Van Winkle slumber.

As the overbridge was woefully inadequate, many started taking a chance of crossing the tracks, thereby risk getting run over by trains.

But the railways chose the easy way out to treat the symptoms and not the disease. It fenced off the tracks to prevent trespassing, but did nothing to ease the passengers' difficulty in moving from one station to another. It was like putting a patient in quarantine, but providing him no treatment whatsoever and leaving him to the mercy of fate.

Hence even a mundane task of commuting to and from offices located near these stations has become a high-risk, life threatening affair.

Also Read: Bangalore Beat