Kanpur train accident: Toll climbs to 149

At least 95 people were killed early Sunday when a Patna-Indore Express train derailed near India’s northern city of Kanpur, according to constable Hari Sharma inside the police control room in Kanpur. Junior railway minister Manoj Sinha said a fractured track might have caused the train to roll off the rails on its journey between the central Indian city of Indore and the eastern city of Patna. “What has happened is that the coaches that collided into one another are completely locked into one another”.

83 of the 202 injured passengers were admitted in hospitals of Kanpur and neighbouring Kanpur-Rural districts while rest of them have been released, Prasad said, adding 73 of them were seriously injured.

Passenger Satish Kumar said that the train was travelling at normal speed when it stopped suddenly. After the last of 14 railroad cars were removed from the tracks by cranes late Monday, no more bodies were found and the rescue operation ended.

Another 179 people are being treated in hospital, 60 of whom are in a serious condition, a spokesman for Indian railways told AFP.

Anxious relatives searched for missing family members among the injured and the dead at hospitals in Kanpur.

A large crowd gathered at the rescue site on Monday, with many combing through the bags and clothes strewn across the area in the hope of finding clues to the fate of their loved ones.

“I am looking for my brother”, said Ramanand Tiwari, according to the Press Trust of India news agency. “We have searched everywhere”, said Ramanand Tiwari.

He is the only member of his family who survived.

“Whoever I tried to look for is dead”.

She said: “I can not find my father and I have been looking everywhere for him. I immediately held the metal rod near the bathroom door”, said Faizal Khan who was traveling with his wife and two children, all of whom survived the accident.

Railways Minister Suresh Prabhu made a suo motu statement in the Lok Sabha and said a “forensic probe” has been ordered in the tragedy.

The largely colonial-era railway system, the world’s fourth largest, carries about 23 million people every day.

India is in urgent need of upgrading its railways and China can offer the necessary help, official media said in Beijing on Tuesday as it expressed concerns over the poor maintenance of India’s rail network following the deadly train derailment that claimed over 140 lives.

“It is hard to say how many people were exactly travelling but it was definitely over 2,000”, said a spokesman for regional railway network. In the past, there have been even worse accidents, like in Bihar in 1981, when an estimated 500 to 800 people died as a passenger train derailed on a bridge and plunged into the Baghmati River.

Last year Indian government announced an investment of over 137 billion US dollars over a period on next five years to boost railways and modernise it on new lines.