KOLKATA, India: India will launch an investigation on Tuesday into a train collision that killed nine people in West Bengal state and injured more than 50, a day after a top railway official blamed the incident on driver error.
The death toll was reduced to nine from 15 after Monday’s accident in which a freight train plowed into a passenger train heading to the state capital Kolkata, from the northeastern state of Tripura.
An investigation by India’s top railway safety official will begin on Tuesday, Chetan Kumar Shrivastava, general manager of the Northeast Frontier Railway, where the accident occurred, told Reuters.
“The investigation will include eyewitness accounts, analysis of official documents and statements by railway officials regarding signaling and other mandatory safety issues,” he added.
On Monday, a top Indian Railways official said the driver of a freight train, who was among the dead, disregarded a signal, leading to the crash of the Kanchanjunga Express train as it stopped near a railway station in Darjeeling district.
A railway spokesman said there were 1,400 people on board.
However, media reported that the automatic signaling system was not working as of Monday morning, prompting authorities to advise train drivers to run slower than usual, in a process called “paper signals.”
Indian opposition leaders have criticized the railway safety record of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, attributing it to negligence.
The incident comes just over a year after about 288 people died in one of India’s worst train disasters in neighboring Odisha state, caused by a signaling error.
State-owned Indian Railways, known for overcrowding, is the world’s fourth largest rail network, carrying 13 million passengers daily and handling nearly 1.5 billion tonnes of cargo in 2022.
In remarks to the media on Monday, top railway official Jaya Varma Sinha, who chairs the Indian Railway Board, called for reducing human errors, adding that an anti-collision system was being set up across the country.
Railway authorities said partial services resumed on damaged tracks on Tuesday, with some trains diverted to other routes and others running slower than usual.