Rescuers yesterday ended their search for survivors among the twisted remains of a derailed train as the death toll from one of India’s worst rail disasters rose to 146.
Parts of the train were mangled beyond recognition when the Indore-Patna Express derailed, sending carriages crashing into each other in the early hours of Sunday.
Rescuers worked through the night, picking through the wreckage with sniffer dogs in hopes of finding more survivors.
But they called off the search yesterday afternoon as the last of the carriages was removed from the tracks.
“We recovered eight bodies today and the rescue operations were called off late afternoon. There is no hope for more survivors,” said Anil Shekhawat, spokesman for the National Disaster Response Force.
Another 179 people are being treated in hospital, 60 of whom are in a serious condition, a spokesman for Indian Railways said.
“The rail line has been cleared and some restoration work is on. The line will be fit for traffic in few hours from now,” added spokesman Vijay Kumar.
At least 2,000 people are believed to have been on the train at the time – many travelling without reserved seats or any ticket at all.
Many of the injured were young children who had become separated from relatives.
Doctors were using WhatsApp to try to reunite children with relatives – sharing photos of their unidentified patients with other hospitals in the area via the messaging app.
The disaster occurred at the peak of India’s marriage season, and at least one wedding party was on board the train.
Local media said wedding clothes, jewellery and invitation cards could be seen spilling from abandoned bags.
Eleven-year-old Abhay Srivastava was travelling to a wedding with his parents and two sisters.
He is the only member of his family who survived.
Whimpering in pain with multiple broken bones and stitches all over his body, Srivastava repeatedly called out for his mother.
“’Tell her I am calling’.This is all he has been saying since yesterday,” his uncle Rajesh Kumar Srivastava said.
“How can I tell the child that everything that was his is lost,” he added.
A fracture in the track is thought to have caused the train to derail at around 3am, and Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu has promised a thorough investigation.
“Forensic inquiry has been ordered to look into all possible angles. Guilty will be given strictest possible punishment,” he said, addressing a rowdy crowd of lawmakers in the Lok Sabha,lower house of parliament, yesterday.
India’s railway network, one of the world’s largest, is still the main form of long-distance travel in the vast country, but it is poorly funded and deadly accidents occur relatively frequently.
A 2012 government report said almost 15,000 people were killed every year on India’s railways and described the loss of life as an annual “massacre”.
The government has signed numerous deals with private companies to upgrade the ageing rail network.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi this year pledged record levels of investment and has announced a new high-speed line funded by Japan, but little progress has been made on upgrading tracks or installing modern signalling equipment on the main network.
He has also shied away from raising highly subsidised fares that leave the railways with next to nothing for investment - by some analyst estimates, they need Rs20tn ($293.34bn) of investment by 2020.
Bahujan Samaj Party cheif Mayawati, one of Modi’s biggest rivals in Uttar Pradesh, said the government should have “invested in mending tracks instead of spending billions and trillions of rupees on bullet trains”.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi accused Modi of having wrong priorities on developing rail infrastructure, noting the prime minister was busy building bullet trains, which will be useful for a few thousand people, when there was need to enhance rail safety mechanisms.
A man grieves as family members search for missing relatives outside the Akbarpur morgue after a train derailed near Pukhrayan in Kanpur district, yesterday.
