Who is the railway minister of india 2023

But on Friday night, a devastating three-train pileup in eastern India — one of the worst transportation disasters in the country’s history — killed 275 people and injured about 1,000, forcing Prime Minister Narendra Modi to cancel the ceremony. He visited the crash site and wounded patients at a nearby hospital instead. The collision in India’s Odisha state, which threw passenger cars from the tracks, drew fresh scrutiny of the safety and viability of the 19th-century rail network, first built by the British. The system, which snakes across the country for more than 67,000 miles, now handles roughly 22 million passengers each day, according to government figures. The tragedy unfolded Friday evening when the Coromandel Express, which was ferrying passengers from Howrah to Chennai on India’s eastern coast, took the wrong track and collided with a freight train near the Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore, a district in Odisha. Soon after that, the Superfast Express running from Bangalore to Howrah crashed into the other two trains. Akhileshwar Sahay, a retired railways official who now works as a transportation consultant, said he hopes the accident will be an “eye-opener” to the Railways Ministry. “This accident gives us many messages. The first message is to change the … machinery, change the manpower, change the management ethos,” he said. “To be fair, I do think we could spend more on safety,” said G. Raghuram, a railway operations expert and former director of the India...