On Thursday, at least 20 people were injured when eight coaches of the Mumbai-Bhubaneswar Lokmanya Tilak Terminus Express derailed near Cuttack in eastern Odisha. The chief public relations officer (CPRO) from India’s East Coast Railway said there were no fatalities.
The accident took place when the passenger train hit a goods train, possibly because of low visibility, due to dense fog.
Railway authorities have yet to calculate the nature of the injuries or if there were more injured people as fire personnel, railway officials, and police were carrying out rescue operations near the scene of the accident.
Five trains were diverted on the route, as the derailed coaches have yet to be removed.
India’s federal Railway Minister Piyush Goyal told parliament in December 2019 that 46 incidents of derailment were recorded in 2018 and 29 derailments in 2019.
Indian Railways is the largest rail network in the world by size with a route length of over 67,000 kilometres. It runs more than 20,000 passenger trains daily carrying 23 million passengers and 3 million tonnes of freight daily.