Mumbai Commuter Rail division: Some ideas on fixing the commercial capital’s lifeline
World Ostrich Day is on the second of February. But, in Mumbai, ostriches reign supreme every day.
Nothing exemplifies this better in recent days than the reaction of the powers that be to a billboard, commissioned by an adhesive company, which deployed a photograph (perhaps from the late 1980s) of a suburban local train packed to the gills with commuters.
In the same week in April, newspapers reported the deaths of two young men within 10 minutes of each other as they fell from overcrowded trains. And two more just five minutes apart in the first week of May. Par for the course in a commuter railway system in which, according to an affidavit submitted by the railways to the Bombay High Court in December 2024, over 51,000 people died in the last 20 years.
Not all of them slipped from running trains; the numbers included fatalities involving people, characterised by the railways as trespassers, who walk across or along railway lines as part of their daily commute.
My first introduction to a regular commute on the railways was also in the late 1980s when, as a...
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