Blood on the Tracks

{ONE}

THE TRAINS SPED PAST, their roar regularly interrupting our conversation. The earth trembled and we sat silent. The room was darkened against the scorching forty-degree heat outside. We were sitting in a small gang hut, just big enough to accommodate an iron bed frame. Ramnaresh Paswan and Hemraj Meena, two railway track maintainers, spoke to me while five others, exhausted from their shift, slept in an adjoining room. It was May in Mumbai, and we were near a series of tracks that service both long-distance and metropolitan trains.

Ramnaresh is a leading organiser of the Central Railway Track Maintainers’ Union and general secretary of the All-India Railway Track Maintainers Union. He showed me photograph after photograph on his phone, shining painfully bright in the dark of the room. Mutilated bodies strewn across railway tracks, some reduced to just their torsos. Bloodied heads and hands. Grieving family members. All dead track maintainers, run over by trains. “We die like insects,” Ramnaresh said. “If a train driver, guard or station master is killed, the trains stop. But when a track maintainer dies, his body remains on the line for two hours.” According to Ramnaresh, an event like this often does not even merit a visit from their senior section engineer, let alone the divisional railway manager. Because of the impact of the train, the bodies are often cut into pieces and flung over long distances. “We have to gather them together,” he said.

Two months later, I heard similar statements in Haryana. In Jind, I met Narendra Panchal, the national president of the AIRTU and Manish Kaushik, the general secretary of the union in the Northern Railways. Narendra compared their lives to those of street dogs. “When it dies, no one grieves,” he said. “In the same way, no one has any objection to trackmen dying. If he is dying, that’s okay. If he goes, then tomorrow another will come. If he dies, a third will come.”