In the middle of the night, people of the slum near Tejgaon rail crossing were awoken by a noise that appeared to be the scream of a young woman. Even though they were quite accustomed to loud noises in the middle of the night, as their homes bordered a rail track, that scream was quite unusual.

Photo by GMB Akash

The scream continued and they soon discovered that it was coming from the garment’s worker Maya’s shanty. A crowd had gathered and it had emerged that her 3 year old girl, Sufia, was missing, and Maya had searched fro her around the periphery of the slums and not found her daughter.

A search party was formed and the men looked around again and some even went to the nearby Police Station. The police promised to look into the matter in the morning.

As the locals went back to bed, Maya continued her despairing screams. She could not be consoled at any cost; they had to find her baby. Around 6 am in the morning, Rahmat bhai, a rickshawala and resident of the slums returned from the mosque with bad news.

 A child’s body has been found on the rail tracks and it fitted Sufia’s description.

 It was later uncovered that in the middle of the night, Sufia had slipped away from their shanty to go to bathroom without her old grandmother noticing it. Her mother comes home late as she works late hours in a garments factory. The girl wondered astray in the dark and as they live close to a rail track, she fell on to the tracks. She got stuck and was run over.

‘When Sufia and I came to the city, we had nothing. For a long time, my baby suffered and I could not provide her with much food. A few months ago, I had just gotten a good job at a garments factory. Things were looking up. But look how fate has stolen my joy again,’ says Maya.

Early last year, her husband kicked out Maya and Sufia. He did not want the burden of a female child in his household and soon wanted to remarry. Desperate and distraught, Maya headed home, but she was not welcome there as her stepmother did not want her. With no option, she headed to the city for a better life for her daughter.

Data from the Bangladesh Railway (BR) say that 4202 people were killed and 2,587 injured in 5,289 train accidents in the past year. 93 of them were head-on collisions and the rest were derailments according to BR records. In 2005-06, 25 people were killed and 102 injured in 620 accidents of which 10 were head-on collisions alongside 610 derailments. At least 119 people were killed from January till September 2005 in accidents on the 39 kilometres Tongi-Dhaka-Narayanganj line. In 2004 the number of people killed was 172. But these numbers are possibly higher as many of the accidents like Sufia’s go unreported.

Sources inside the BR have revealed to New Age this week that more than 4,000 unauthorized level crossings have played a major role in most of the train accidents across the country. There are 36 authorized level crossings between Narayanganj and Tongi. Twenty-two more were set up at different points in the capital city without the permission of the railway authorities. There are 5 unauthorized crossings between Chashara and Fatullah, nine between the airport and Tongi, four between Fatullah and Gandaria, four from the Dhaka cantonment to Zia International Airport. The local government has constructed 12 of them, two each by Dhaka City Corporation (DCC) and the Tongi municipality, whilst the Dakkhinkhan union council has built five.

 Without the permission of the rail authorities, which is mandatory under the Railway Act 1890, a number of roads have been built across rail tracks. Such unauthorized level crossings do not have the proper equipment and monitoring system in place to ensure the safety of the public.

‘The rail authorities have asked the organizations that constructed the roads for funds to set up gate barriers, warning signs and other necessary equipment, and also to deploy gatekeepers and signalmen several times, without much success,’ says the source.

‘On July 11 of this year, 33 people were killed and 40 others injured in a gruesome accident when an express train rammed into a local bus on the level crossing at Akkelpur. The level crossing at Jaipurhat is an unauthorized one and this accident could have been avoided,’ points out Ferdous Alam, director of traffic at the BR, who singled out illegal level crossings as the major reason for accidents.

On the morning of July 8, Fariduddin Ahmed, a former additional secretary of the information ministry, met a tragic end of his life in an accident at Khilkhet level crossing. According to eyewitnesses, the gateman of the level crossing had lowered the protective bar quite a few minutes before the train passed through. Unfortunately, Farid’s left leg got stuck in between the lines when he tried to cross them. The accident occurred when Farid was going to his sister’s house at Khilkhet.

‘Violation of traffic rules by the vehicles and pedestrians in the rail crossings is mainly responsible for such accidents,’ says Anhar Mahmud, divisional manager of BR.

‘The drivers and pedestrians often show poor level of common sense. The drivers often compete with the gate-man at the rail crossings during closure of the gates,’ adds Anhar, one of the accused in the death, blaming the drivers and pedestrians for taking unnecessary risk.

 The gateman at the Khilkhet crossing alleged that the vehicle drivers often cross the rail tracks using the opposite lane of the road even after the gate is closed. ‘When a train is about to pass a crossing, it’s difficult for a gate-man to lower the barrier, show the green signal to the train driver and at the same time prevent vehicles and pedestrians from crossing the gate,’ he says.

‘But if there is an accident, the public blames us and has beaten a few of us to death. We are not to blame,’ he adds.

Due to the large number of rail crossings and the sheer negligence of the people, train drivers complain that it is becoming increasingly risky and difficult to drive through Dhaka with a train.

 ‘On all trip I have seen drivers and pedestrians crossing the rail tracks hurriedly and they regularly use the wrong side of the lane or even cross the tracks by lifting the barrier,’ says a locomotive master on condition of anonymity.

 ‘Apart from for whistling repeatedly, we cannot do anything else,’ he adds.

‘Slums, shops and kitchen markets, set up dangerously close to rail tracks in violation of law, are also a major reason for accidents,’ says the insider at the BR. Kitchen markets have also sprouted on either side of the tracks at Jurain, Khilgaon, Malibagh, Gopibagh, Tejgaon, Karwan Bazar and Nakhalpara, increasing the risk of accidents.

In order to increase public safety, the BR blocked several roads with iron rods but local people removed the barriers at night on every occasion. “We put barriers on the unauthorized rail crossings but these are stolen,’ says the source.

According to Shahidul Islam, a high ranked official of BR, it is very difficult to implement programmes due to undue pressure and interference by influential locals. The authorities had planned to build protection walls beside the tracks in the densely populated areas under Bangladesh Railway’s ‘Dhaka to Joydevpur Dual-Gauge Project’. Except for a few locations in Nakhalpara area, the project could not be implemented.

But the people of the slums feel differently. ‘There is a nexus of syndicates who use the slums as stations to run a wide range of criminal activities all over the city. A protective wall and other safety measures might cause disruptions in such vices. By building rail crossings this nexus protects their vested interests,’ says an elder of the Khilgaon slums, who accuses the DCC and ward commissioners of building such crossings to help the criminal syndicates in exchange of money.

‘Moreover, I think this is just propaganda by the railway department to place the blame on someone else. The railway department has failed to enforce the rules and every time these accidents could have been prevented had they done their duty,’ complains Monir Alam, a resident of Malibagh.

The General Railway Police conducted several eviction drives against the illegal markets at the request of the railway authorities. ‘The railway authorities have spent a lot of money and effort to bring back railway lands by evicting the slums but within a short period of time the influential people rebuild those slums,’ says a top official of the Railway Police.

Adding to the risk quotient is the fact that most automatic warning bells, signal lights and telephones, which are key to communications between one crossings with the other, often remain out of order. ‘We don’t have adequate manpower to prevent the vehicles from such violation of rules. The railway authorities maintain one gate-man in every authorized rail crossing,’ Anhar concedes.

As the blame is being shifted from one party to another, inactivity is the result. ‘Thus Sufia and many others are lost in the middle of the night from us forever,’ cries Maya.