Families Try To Identify Bodies After India’s Deadliest Train Crash In Decades

Families of those killed in the biggest train accident to strike India in decades have crowded a hospital in Bhubaneswar city to identify and collect bodies.

The All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the eastern city was surrounded by grieving family members of the passengers who died in the accident on Friday.

Survivors receiving medical attention in hospitals at the same time stated they were still trying to make sense of the catastrophe. The images of the victims were displayed on two sizable screens outside the hospital.

Each body was given a number, and family members watched as the images changed while observing features like clothing for clues as they stood close to the screen.

Many of them claimed that to locate and claim bodies, a procedure that took a three days due to the severity of the injuries, they had made frantic trips for days from neighboring states, taking multiple trains, buses, or rental automobiles.

According to Mayur Sooryavanshi, an administrator in charge of the identification procedure at the hospital in the state capital of Odisha, roughly 125 miles south of the scene of the railway catastrophe in Balasore, only 45 remains have been identified thus far, and 33 have been given to the family.

After traveling 520 miles from the neighboring state of Bihar on Sunday, Upendra Ram started looking for his son, Retul Ram. Mr. Ram, who said that Retul, 17, was en route to Chennai in search of employment, found the one-day trip in a rental automobile to be taxing.

On Monday at about noon, Mr. Ram identified his kid after spending hours looking at pictures of the deceased.

“I just want to take the dead body and go back home. He was a very good son,” said Mr. Ram, adding that Retul had dropped out of school and wanted to earn money for the family.

“My wife and daughter can’t stop crying at home. They are asking me to bring the body back quickly,” he said, wiping tears from his eyes with a red scarf he had tied around his head.

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One of the worst rail accidents in India’s history occurred on Friday, killing everyone on board.

The accident, in which a passenger train collided with a freight train, derailed on the tracks and was then struck by another passenger train traveling in the opposite way on a parallel track, was said to have been caused by a signaling failure, according to investigators.

Two passenger trains—the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express from Bengaluru, Karnataka, to Howrah, and the Coromandel Express traveling from Howrah, West Bengal, to Chennai, Tamil Nadu, were involved in the collision, according to officials.

On Sunday, authorities suggested that the incident be the subject of an inquiry by India’s Central Bureau of Investigations, which handles the nation’s top criminal cases.

At least 123 trains that were scheduled to travel through Odisha after the disaster were either canceled or delayed, Indian Railways reported on Sunday. Due to the inconvenience, air travel costs to Odisha increased, which prompted India’s civil aviation government to caution airlines to keep an eye out for unusual price increases.

In the meantime, some train travel was resumed on the lines where the collision occurred on Sunday evening, following two days of repair work in which hundreds of employees with excavators cleared mangled train debris.

The Balasore tragedy happened while Prime Minister Narendra Modi concentrated on modernizing India’s colonial-era railroad system.

With more than 40,000 miles of track, 14,000 passenger trains, and 8,000 stops, the South Asian country has one of the largest and most intricate rail networks in the world.

It is dispersed throughout the nation, ranging from tropical ports in the south to the Himalayas in the north, but has been undermined by years of poor management. Several hundred incidents occur annually, despite efforts to increase safety.

Human mistake or antiquated signaling equipment is to blame for the majority of train accidents.

In one of India’s worst train accidents, two trains collided in August 1995 close to New Delhi, killing 358 people.

Between the towns of Indore and Patna, a passenger train derailed in 2016, killing 146 people.

India has more than 22 million train passengers daily.