Balasore Rail Crash: Railway Board Recommends CBI Probe, Ashwini Vaishnaw Says ‘Root Cause’ Discovered

Under pressure to resign, the railway minister refused to go into details of what the root cause was and said, ‘Let the report come out.’

New Delhi: The Odisha government has released revised figures on the death toll of the June 2 train accident in Odisha’s Balasore. The new toll is at 275 – the earlier was 288 – and 187 bodies are yet to be identified.

On Sunday evening, it was reported that the Railway Board has recommended that the Central Bureau of Investigation probe the accident.

Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who has been on the receiving end of demands for his resignation following one of the worst railway accidents in India, said today, June 4, that the “root cause of and people responsible” for the crash was been “identified” and that it was an issue of point machine and electronic interlocking.

Vaishnaw also refused to “go into details.” “Let the report come out,” he said.

Congress MP Shaktisinh Gohil and spokesperson Pawan Khera in a press conference today doubled down on the Narendra Modi government’s role in perpetuating this disaster, calling it “man made” and asking for Vaishnaw’s resignation. The party has also released a detailed statement on the incident, pointing to several flaws.

The minister, reported the news agency PTI, denied that the incident had anything to do with the anti-collision system “Kavach”.

“This accident occurred due to changes to the electronic interlocking system. The remarks of (West Bengal chief minister and former railway minister) Mamata Banerjee are not true,” Vaishnaw said.

A day ago, Banerjee had asked why the Union government’s ‘Kavach’ system was missing from the route where the collision took place.

The Union government has been attempting to further its claim that the incident was human error and not the result of systemic failures. However, a report on The Wire notes that the government’s narrative is hard to square with what its own auditor, the Comptroller and Auditor General, said in its 2022 report, ‘Derailment in Indian Railways’.

The crash involved the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, the Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express, and a goods train, near the Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore.

Meanwhile, Hindu rightwing social media participants had claimed – falsely – in viral tweets that a structure close to the site of the crash was a mosque and implied that the crash was sabotage by Muslims who had congregated there for Friday prayers.

While this claim was also tweeted by Radharaman Das, the vice-president of the Hindu religious organisation, ISKCON, it turned out that the structure was actually not a mosque at all but an ISKCON temple.

The Odisha Police, without mentioning the particular tweet, also issued an appeal to desist from triggering communal disharmony around the incident.