GUWAHATI
The Gauhati High Court has closed a two-year-old case against the railways for allegedly ignoring a 2015 safety report to undertake a gauge conversion project in a landslide-prone hill section in Assam.
An order closing the petition filed by Silchar-based Baharul Islam Barbhuiya, the chief convenor of All Barak Youth Students’ Association, was issued on July 30, the day when landslides killed more than 300 people in Kerala’s Wayanad district.
The petitioner had alleged that the railways, specifically the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR), were not undertaking appropriate safety measures while operating trains in the 170-km-long Lumding-Badarpur section. Much of the arterial track, connecting southern Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, and Tripura with the rest of the country, meanders through Dima Hasao, a hill district in central Assam.
In their affidavit-in-opposition, the railway authorities claimed that they have been ensuring all security measures according to the instructions of the Railway Board and the NFR officials. “…we are of the view that the railway authorities have taken several measures for the safety of train operation” in the hill segment, the order from Justice Suman Shyam read.
Completed in 1899, the Lumding-Badarpur metre gauge line underwent conversion to broad gauge in 2004. Extremism and a fragile terrain kept delaying the project until its completion and inauguration in March 2015.
The metre gauge track was virtually disaster-free but movement of passenger and goods trains was often disrupted on the broad gauge track – mostly on a different alignment – due to landslides. In May 2022, the track was damaged at least 56 stretches following heavy rainfall and Indian Air Force choppers had to be engaged to rescue passengers stranded in a slush-trapped train.
Mr Barbhuiya filed the petition soon after the 2022 disaster through advocate Fazluzzaman Mazumder. The Gauhati High Court subsequently asked the NFR to explain why a report of the Commissioner of Railway Safety in 2015 was not implemented for a landslide-prone hill section.
During the conversion work from 2004 to 2015, the principal director of audit warned the railway authorities that the project started without adequate geotechnical investigation and could be derailed due to faulty planning and failure to visualise the soil strata behaviour.
The 2015 report of the Commissioner of Railway Safety later underlined major loopholes that required to be addressed before operating passenger trains on the track. The report said the provision of Section 22(1) of the Railway Act of 1989 had not been substantially complied with for the newly constructed broad-gauge track to be opened for passenger traffic.
The landslides that caused extensive damage to the hill section track and other railway property were among 592 landslides reported across the northeast between 2017 and July 2024. Data shared in Parliament on July 31 also said 196 of these cases occurred from April to July this year.
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