More than 30 people were killed in southern India on Monday morning when the train coach they were traveling in caught fire.
The incident took place near the Nellore train station in Andhra Pradesh, on an express train traveling from New Delhi to Chennai known as the Tamil Nadu Express. Only one car, a sleeper coach with 72 passengers, was affected and the fire did not spread, railroad officials said.
Twenty-five injured people have been admitted to Nellore hospitals, and 32 are dead, said K. Sambasiva Rao, a spokesman for South Central Railway, in a telephone interview. The dead included 19 men, six women and three children. The rest of the bodies are too badly burnt to tell their gender. “We have ordered a high-level investigation,†he said.
The fire started at 4:15 a.m., railroad officials said, and was put out by 5:20 a.m., after it was noticed by a station manager in Nellore. A Nellore official told NDTV that the fire may have been started by a short circuit near a toilet. Passengers could not escape after the railroad car's doors jammed, eyewitnesses told reporters. Indian trains rarely have smoke alarms or fire detection systems.
“It is a very tragic incident,†India's railroad minister, Mukul Roy, told reporters. India's outdated railroad system operates at a loss of 200 billion Indian rupees ($3.6 billion) a year, and needs massive investments to update antiquated equipment, but raising prices to pay for improvements is seen as politically unpopular.
“If you do not increase the fares, you are going to turn the railway coaches into coffins,†the former railroad minister, Dinesh Trivedi, warned after he was asked to resign this year, after attempting to raise fares.
“Indian Railways is running 20,000 passenger trains carrying 2.2 million passengers every day,†Mr. Roy said Monday in Kolkata. “A small human error c an make an accident,†he said.
Y. Sampath, 23, a software engineer who boarded the train with his sister, told The Hindu newspaper that he woke up Monday morning after hearing loud screams. “All I could see was black smoke,†he said. Mr. Sampath escaped through one of the doors that was not locked but his sister is missing.
The government has announced total compensation of 500,000 Indian rupees ($9,100) to the next of kin of dead passengers.
