India's rail network is undergoing a $30 billion transformation with gleaming new trains and modern stations under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's push to boost infrastructure and connectivity. The third source said the preliminary probe suggested that the signalling system was bypassed because the repair workers were trying to fix the malfunctioning barrier. "It is yet to be ascertained whether the intervention was intentional or by mistake or whether due to ongoing work near the signal." "(Indian) Railways believes the system was tampered with," said the second source, who has access to briefings on the investigation. One of the three Indian Railways sources - all of whom had knowledge of the ongoing CRS probe - said initial investigation suggests the automatic electronic signalling system was "changed manually, for which the software has to be tampered with". People from the department would come and fix it," he said. "The barrier would malfunction sometimes. He said the barrier seemed to be functioning fine at the time. Niranjan Sarangi, a 66-year-old retired school teacher who spends many evenings sitting near the crossing with friends, was there at the time of the crash. "The electric barrier would sometimes go up and sometimes it wouldn’t," said Soubhagya Ranjan Sarangi, 25, a pharmacist with a shop close to the railway crossing. The official did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the crash investigation. If the barrier was open, the automated signal system would not allow a train to go past the rail-road crossing, one retired Indian Railways official said. When there was a fault, the barrier would remain stuck in the closed position and had to be manually opened by railway workers, the residents said. Reuters spoke to five residents of Bahanaga village who said the barrier at the railway crossing had been faulty for nearly three months and had been repaired frequently. Asked about investigators' suspicions that the electronic system may have been manually bypassed, Sharma said: "These are all speculations which we cannot confirm at this juncture."Ī spokesman for the federal police’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which has opened a separate probe into possible criminal negligence, did not respond to a request for comment. He declined to elaborate further on the causes of the crash, saying: "the investigation is on".Īmitabh Sharma, chief information officer at the Railways Ministry, said the cause of the accident was still under investigation. ![]() The board reports to the Railways Ministry.Ī spokesman for Indian Railways said "repair works keep happening as per requirements" but tampering with the automated system is not allowed. Indian Railways, the fourth largest train network in the world, is a state monopoly run by the Railway Board. The CRS, which is India's rail safety authority, did not respond to a request for comment. However, details of the frequent malfunctions at the nearby rail-road barrier and its possible connection to a manual bypass of the signalling system are reported by Reuters for the first time. Indian and international media have previously reported that a possible malfunction in the automated signalling system may have led to the crash. It was India's worst rail crash in two decades. The June 2 crash at Bahanaga Bazar station, in the Balasore district of the eastern Indian state of Odisha, killed at least 288 people and injured more than 1,000.
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