On September 1, the Central Bureau of Investigation filed a charge sheet against three arrested railway officials in the Balasore train accident case. The charge sheet has been filed under sections pertaining to alleged culpable homicide not amounting to murder and causing the disappearance of evidence.
The three officers, senior section engineer (in Soro) Amir Khan, senior section engineer (Signals) Arun Kumar Mahanta and technician Pappu Kumar, were arrested by CBI on 7th of July concerning the accident on the 2nd of June. All three officials were posted in Balasore district. The central agency said in the charge sheet that the trio tried to destroy the evidence to evade detection of their role in the accident following the collision.
The charge sheet has been submitted before a special judicial magistrate in Bhubaneswar. The central agency mentioned that based on the evidence collected during the investigation, the three committed offences under Sections 304(II) (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 34 read with 201 (causing disappearance of evidence of offence with common intention) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Section 153 (endangering the safety of railways passenger by the willful act of omission) of the Railways Act.
CBI looked for all angles during the investigation, including foul play, technical glitches and human error. During the investigation, they found that there was a fault in the wiring in a location box that had cables to control the signalling function. It had gone undetected by the Signal and Telecom staff. Furthermore, the notes logged in the data logger device from 3 PM to 11:58 PM on 2nd of June were examined to reconstruct the chronology of the events leading to the accident.
According to the investigating agency, senior Railway officials discovered that Mr. Mahanta was informed four hours after the accident that the point indication was normal, despite the damaged point machines. Additionally, it was alleged that a labelling error had gone unnoticed by ground staff since 2018.
As per the charge sheet, the accused were directly responsible for the upkeep of signal and telecommunication assets at the railway station where the accident occurred. The repair work at the level crossing gate no. 94 were done under the direct supervision of Mahanta using the circuit diagrams of LC gate no. 79.
The circuit diagrams of another LC gate no. 79 were used during wiring work at north Goomty (hu) of the station for changing the operation of level crossing gate no. 94 from 100 volt AC to 24 volt DC. It was the accused’s duty to ensure the altercations were made to the existing signal and interlocking installations were as per the approved plan and instruction. However, they failed to do their duties.
During wiring work on the control operation of the ELB, the S&T staff supposedly used F23 and F24 terminals as “spares” and rewired the new ELB connection to those terminals as indicated in the circuit diagrams. This resulted in the disconnection of the feed from crossover 17A/B to 17 NWKR circuit, the location of the accident, causing the green signal indication feed to become delinked from the ground status.
CBI took over the case within a week of the accident
The Indian Railways requested the CBI inquiry in June. The Odisha government recommended a CBI inquiry on 5th of June, three days after the accident. CBI took over the case on 6th of June and filed an FIR in the matter.
Railway inquiry into the accident
Soon after the accident, Indian Railways initiated a high-level inquiry. The committee found ‘wrong signalling’ to be the main reason for the accident. The report suggested lapses at multiple levels in the signalling and telecommunication department led to the accident. There were red flags raised in the past, but they were ignored.
In its report, the Commission of Railway Safety (CRS) to the Railway Board noted that if the station manager of Bahanaga Bazar had reported the unusual behaviour of the switches connecting two parallel tracks, the accident would have been averted. Furthermore, station-specific approved circuit diagrams were unavailable, and other diagrams were used, which was termed the “wrong step that led to wrong wiring” in the report. The team of field supervisors modified the wiring diagram but failed to replicate it.
A similar incident occurred on 16th of May 2022 at Bankranayabaz station in the Kharagpur Division of the South Eastern Railway. No corrective measures were taken after the incident to address the issue of wrong wiring, leading to the accident that killed 296 people.
Balasore Train Accident
On 2nd June 2023, 296 people died, and over 1,200 were injured in the tragic accident at Bahanaga Bazar station in Balasore, Odisha. On the day of the accidents, the Coromandel Express crashed into a stationary freight train. As a result of the Balasore Train Accident, some of the derailed coaches fell onto the adjacent tracks. A few minutes later, the Yeshwantpur-Howrah Express train came on those tracks and collided with the derailed coaches.
