A very disturbing information is at hand through media reports. It seems that, despite the Railways having a massively funded insurance scheme for victims of rail mishaps, not a single family of the 41 deceased or the several hundreds injured in the Jagadalpur-Bhubaneswar Hirakhand Express derailment will be eligible for payment of compensation by way of insurance cover.
The mishap occurred near Kuneru railway station in Vizianagaram district of Andhra Pradesh on the night of January 21 last. The denial of insurance benefit to the affected passengers and/or to their families might sound odd. But the explanations given by railway authorities are more objectionable. This shows how even a prominent entity like the Indian Railways is playing a fraud on the hapless ordinary passengers.
One reasoning by the railway authorities is that the insurance cover — of Rs 10 lakh per dead in any rail mishap, as also the same amount for those who faced permanent disability, and Rs5 lakh for partial disability, as also Rs2 lakh for hospital treatment — is not for all passengers. Only those who booked tickets/made reservations by online mode will be entitled to the insurance.
This leaves out the vast majority of train passengers who booked their tickets at the railway counters. It so happened, and understandably so, that only 82 passengers in the train were entitled to insurance cover, and none of these passengers was among the dead or the injured.
Hence, the Railways and its associate in the insurance scheme, the ICICI Lombard General Insurance, could simply wash their hands off this mishap and consequent damage payments. Thus the need to pay a single pie by way of insurance cover has been smartly waived. This, in the matter of one of the worst train mishaps in recent times.
According to the railway ministry’s record itself, 45 per cent of the bookings in trains are still done across the railway ticket counters — meaning in off-line mode, and not online. None of them will ever be eligible for an insurance cover. For those who book online, too, intricate conditions apply.
The insurance scheme was introduced for passengers in September last year, and initially it was optional. Only about 20 per cent of the passengers opted to pay a token amount of 92 paise for the insurance cover. Lack of awareness about the scheme was the major reason.
This payment has been done away with after demonetisation — what a mercy!
It is very clear that the entire scheme has been poorly organised with no seriousness attached to the cause of the passengers. Rather than how to help the victims of a rail mishap and their families out, extraneous factors have been brought into play, to the serious disadvantage of the common people at the receiving end.
This scheme would ultimately help only the insurance related business, which can keep taking hefty sums from the railways and avoid making any payments to the victims. It is understandable that the mandarins of the Railway Board have given their nod for the provisions, but the Narendra Damodardass Modi government cannot absolve itself of the responsibility of fashioning such a terribly anti-people and anti-passenger policy vis-a-vis accident insurance.
The railway ministry run for the past nearly three years by minister Sadananda Gowda first and Suresh Prabhu later, is found wanting in imaginatively reorienting the railways in better ways. The talk of bullet trains has reached nowhere so far, and now the Rail Budget, too, has been done away with.
This has robbed such a key governmental sector of its individuality, and from the looks of it, this too might soon be described as a ‘Tughlaquian’ measure on the part of the Modi government.
It is all-right for the bureaucracy to device insurance schemes in ways that they benefit only insurance companies, but people are at the centre of the scheme of things for the political leadership, be it the BJP, the Congress or others. The political establishment cannot allow such a situation to evolve.
Railway insurance should, in the event of accidents, be such that it benefits each of the affected passengers, and in the best possible ways. Online, off-line and when no line is available then across the counter differentiations in grant of insurance cover or compensation is tantamount to a criminal disregard for public sentiments.
It is high time the Railway ministry effects the necessary changes in its insurance scheme.
