Balasore: There’s a constant beeping noise inside the station manager’s tiny office at Bahanaga Bazar railway station. The source of the beeping noise is the station manager’s panel, and officers currently on duty, whose shifts usually last six-eight hours, don’t remember when it first went off — they’ve just been working through it.
The station has been in a state of alarm since the night of 2 June, when a deadly train accident killing at least 275 people thrust Bahanaga Bazar, in Odisha’s Balasore district, into the limelight.
The accident involved the Coromandel Express and the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express, both of which derailed near the Bahanaga Bazar railway station, after the Coromandel Express collided with a third goods train carrying iron ore, parked at the station. The exact cause of the accident is yet to be determined.
Unlike the chaos that prevails now in the crammed station manager’s office, there were only two people present there when the accident took place around 6:40 PM Friday — the station manager, and the pointsman. Both have been summoned for an inquiry, along with dozens of others.
Seventy-two hours after the triple train tragedy, the dust has settled over Bahanaga Bazar. Tracks have been reopened and trains have resumed their regular routes, trundling past the small station at a cautious pace. Debris from the accident is still on-site, with bogies from both the Coromandel Express and Yeshwantpur-Howrah Superfast Express lying crumpled on the sides of the track. Construction work to re-lay parts of a track has begun.
Meanwhile, over a thousand injured are recovering in hospitals across Balasore, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar.
The Balasore district magistrate’s office has compiled a list of the dead, spiral-bound into a massive book with photographs that hopeful families have been leafing through. This database is being digitised to make it easier for aggrieved families to identify missing persons.
“Our objective is to ensure that all the missing persons’ family members find them as soon as possible,” a visibly emotional railway minister told the press on 4 June. “Our responsibility is not over yet,” he added.
Twenty years before he was inducted into the Union Cabinet, Ashwini Vaishnaw was the district magistrate of Balasore — during which he oversaw relief work in the aftermath of the 1999 super cyclone.
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Paperwork of a disaster
The Balasore district magistrate’s office has formed a task force to issue death certificates. Headed by the assistant district magistrate, the task force comprising health and urban local body officials aims to issue all more than 275 death certificates by this weekend — including a hundred by Tuesday itself.
“With a disaster zone there’s never a final figure of the dead,” says district magistrate Dattatraya Bhausaheb Shinde. “We know that very well in Odisha. And paperwork is nothing compared to the death toll.”
This is the second disaster Shinde is overseeing as the DM of Balasore — the first being the floods in July 2022. But the scale of the two disasters is incomparable and the district magistrate’s office is dealing with far greater chaos and media attention this time around.
They’ve formed a BMC Rail Accident Group on WhatsApp, with seventy members including doctors, bureaucrats and police for real-time updates. There’s also a referral WhatsApp group, in which doctors share photos and information of patients they’re referring to other hospitals so that facilities can be readied to receive them.
The district magistrate himself has been busy meeting with important visitors to the district — from Vaishnaw to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik, besides ministers from states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh.
At his office, additional district magistrate S.K. Bal and chief emergency officer Sai Krishna are busy handling the paperwork. A spiral-bound tome sits on Bal’s desk, with photographs of the dead.
All the bodies have been moved to Bhubaneswar to be identified and claimed, but the Balasore collectorate will be arranging for their death certificates as well as free transportation in ambulances until wherever the family needs. Medical authorities will also take fingerprints and DNA of the dead, to be cross-checked and verified as and when claims from families and missing persons lists come through.
Krishna and Bal pause to have a word with a local representative from Reliance Jio. They say the Jio service was terrible at the time of the accident, causing additional panic — and they had to rely on BSNL to make phone calls. Apologising for signal jams, the Jio representative extended help for fuel and oil, and also offered a mobile dispensing unit for the collectorate to use — but help is futile now, when the storm has blown over.
“You should have come earlier when we needed 150 ambulances,” says Bal, promising to check if they required additional supplies now. “And if you want to donate money, please give it to the CM’s disaster relief fund.”
Part of the paperwork the collectorate has to sort through is the disbursement of funds to patients and the families of victims — both Odisha CM Patnaik and PM Modi have announced compensations. “Our goal is to identify as many bodies as possible. Missing is not good enough for us,” Shinde tells ThePrint, echoing Vaishnaw’s words.
Shinde went to the site along with top medical officials, including the chief district medical officer (CDMO), district public health officer (DPHO), and the assistant divisional medical officer (ADMO). Medical interns from the district hospital were also enlisted to set up medical camps as doctors waded through the wreckage to identify the dead and classify the living as critically injured, severely injured, or injured.
Shinde asked the state government for 100 ambulances — they were sent to Balasore within two hours of the request, and 500 additional ambulances were mobilised and kept on standby.
Dr. Manorama, general superintendent at the Fakir Mohan Medical College & Hospital, who assumed administrative duties during the rescue operation, says she doesn’t remember eating or sleeping in the last 72 hours.
Shinde also credits the bravery of some of the first responders, who took a huge risk by rushing to the train tracks to rescue survivors even before the medical teams came in. These first responders had begun moving dead bodies off the tracks to the closest government building, the Bahanaga High School, before authorities arrived at the spot.
The Odisha State Disaster Management Authority trains Aapada Mitras — around 100-120 community-level volunteers in each block — to be first responders in cases of cyclones, earthquakes, and heat strokes.
“But even so, who would be prepared for this situation?” asked chief emergency officer Krishna, recalling the wails of survivors. “It was worse than a nightmare.”
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Monitoring the debris
At the Bahanaga Bazar station, the panic is no longer palpable. Instead, those on the ground have settled into a lengthy recovery process. Railways workers, construction workers and administration officials mill about the area. Construction workers carry materials to and fro, while some are still cleaning out the debris.
Three bogies of the Coromandel Express lie overturned on one side, while two of the Yeshwantpur Express are on the opposite sides of the tracks.
Police forces on the ground include both the Railway Protection Force (RPF), under the Railways Board, and the Odisha Government Railway Police (GRP). The GRP has filed an FIR in Balasore against unnamed persons for “deaths caused by negligence” and “endangering the safety of persons”. The CBI too has filed an FIR in this regard.
“You can look at our faces and see how we’re doing,” says one GRP officer, squinting in the sun. “We haven’t slept in days. Now we have to wait and see how else to help.”
RPF constable D. Bhattacharjee, for example, has one simple job: guard all the packages and goods the Coromandel Express was carrying. He sits in the shade by the wreckage of three bogies, having overseen the extrication of parcels from one of the carriages. Across from him, hired workers are pulling clothes and other articles out of the debris of one of the carriages — one yellow shirt is flung in the air for someone to catch, while someone else is wrenching out cloth from between slabs of mangled steel.
Bags of parcels are strewn around Bhattacharjee, most of them from online clothing store Ajio and logistics company Shadowfax. He is watching over them until Shadowfax’s representatives come to collect them to return them to vendors.
Each parcel will have to be carefully logged and accounted for — but much to his chagrin, some have already been ripped open or stolen.
Many RPF officers are taking refuge in the nearby ISKCON temple, barely metres from the site of the accident. The temple, which featured in some WhatsApp forwards and fake news articles as a mosque, has been under construction since 2004 and unexpectedly became the base for the RPF and workers tasked with carrying out electrical repair work at the spot.
“Railway property and passengers are our priority,” says Rahul Kumar, an RPF officer dispatched to Balasore from Jamshedpur. He’s been wearing the same uniform for three days straight now and says RPF officers were told to be prepared for 24/7 duty, and don’t know how much longer they’re expected to be at the site.
Many are grumbling that the Railways Board hasn’t made any arrangements for them, forcing them to take refuge from the blistering heat at the ISKCON temple. The heat is so unforgiving that one rescuer from the NDRF reported having hallucinations, and another lost his appetite.
“But this is an emergency. We have to do our duty for the public and the railways. And everything is getting back to normal so fast — what else could we ask for?” adds Kumar.
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A frantic normalcy at Bahanaga Bazar railway station
Three days on, normalcy is yet to return to the Bahanaga Bazar railway station. A few electrical wires are still dangling dangerously low, and lots of construction workers are crossing the tracks on foot. Passengers on trains look at the wreckage below them as the cross, morbidly waving at the media and workers hanging around the station.
The station manager’s office, where a minimum of six people are now operating at any given time, is pushed to capacity.
Several railway officials — many from the South Eastern Railway’s zonal headquarters in Kolkata — have been sent to coordinate efforts at the station, from sending memos to monitoring incoming trains. They’ve settled themselves amongst dusty wires and old, dial-up phones.
On the walls are framed, dusty posters: “Duties of Station Master During Failures of Points & Signals,” declares one, while another has instructions to be followed during foggy weather.
The cause for the accident, according to the Railways Board, was “signalling interference” due to a problem with electronic interference.
While the Commission of Railway Safety is already probing the accident, the case has also been referred to the CBI, which is yet to rule out sabotage. The station manager, the pointsman, and “around 50 others” have been summoned for an inquiry but not yet suspended.
On Tuesday, a ten-member team from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) visited the site as part of its probe into the accident.
“We can’t speculate over what happened,” says one railway official from the Kharagpur zonal office in the room, wiping sweat off his face. “I can’t imagine what the station master was doing at the time.”
He can’t help but say aloud that it was dark, and the pointsman must not have been able to see what was happening. “Now we’re keeping an eye on every little thing,” he says, and two workers around him nod.
All of them diligently ignore the alarm blaring out of the station manager’s panel.
(An earlier version of this report incorrectly mentioned the name of additional district magistrate S.K. Bal as S.K. Pal. The error is regretted)
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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