Bengal forest Dept, Railways for better coordination to prevent train-tusker collision

Kolkata: In an attempt to arrest the case of elephant deaths because of collision with speeding trains the Railways and West Bengal government are adopting some initiatives as regards to ensuring the safety of the tuskers on tracks passing through the elephant corridors.

Among the many joint initiatives to be undertaken on this count, the first will be regarding arrangements of regular workshops to sensitize the locomotive pilots of the precautions to be adopted by them while steering the train through the elephant corridors, especially as regards to the speed limit at that point of time.

The second initiative will be coordination meetings between the officials of the Railways department and state forest department and if possible in every quarter. It has come to the notice of the authorities concerned that the last coordination meeting between the officials of the two departments happened a year ago. A sort of passing the buck exercise has already started between the officials of the departments on which department is actually scheduled to convene such coordination meetings.

On one hand, the state department has claimed that the Railways are supposed to convene such coordination meetings as the latter is responsible for managing the tracks passing through the elephant corridors.

On the other hand the Railways officials claim they are supposed to provide technical and financial support and the forest department, with better expertise in the field, are to carry out the on-ground exercise on this count.

Recently, the railway department has sanctioned a hefty amount of Rs 77 crore to introduce and put in place the intrusion detection system to avoid such collisions to the best possible extent.

The amount of Rs 77 crore has been sanctioned for four divisions of Railways which are the most prone to such collisions, namely Alipurduar, Rangia, Lumding and Katihar.