Mumbai cannot do without its suburban locals. But to use them is entirely and always at one’s own risk—it should never have to be so

Alok Kumar Singh’s story just does not fade from the mind. At 32, he held a post-graduate degree and worked as a lecturer in mathematics at Narsee Monjee College of Commerce & Economics, Vile Parle-Juhu. He lived in Malad with his parents and wife and made the local train commute every day to work and back. Like millions of us who have lived this life in Mumbai together for decades.

On the evening of January 24, Singh was returning home in a Churchgate-Borivali slow train with a colleague. He was planning, reports say, to take his wife out later in the evening to celebrate her birthday. Instead, his body lay lifeless and cold in the innards of a hospital in Kandivali, as his family struggled to come to terms with what had happened. Singh had been stabbed in his abdominal area by a co-commuter and apparently lay bleeding on the Malad platform till procedures could be completed. He was brought dead to the hospital.

What had happened is routine in Mumbai’s locals, as is well known. Jostling for space, stepping over toes, inadvertent push and pull of bags, and a push from someone behind are enough to start fights that easily escalate into incidents of travel rage. Singh was its latest victim. The aggressor, Omkar Shinde, 27 years old, caught after the railway police and other authorities identified him on the CCTV cameras and lay in wait to arrest him, confessed to stabbing Singh with a tweezer or knife-like object because Singh had pointed out he should not push, as there were two women waiting to alight.

“When he said, ‘Can’t you see, there are women?’ they turned to look at me, and I felt humiliated. So, I stabbed him,” Shinde told the cops. He too worked in a small unit in South Mumbai and made the commute every day. He too lived with his family, apparently less well-to-do than Singh’s. And he had anger issues. That evening, it cost a man his life and destroyed a family. There are many threads to untangle here.

Singh’s is one of the nearly 2,500 deaths that are recorded every year on Mumbai’s suburban railway lines, which carry a daily load of a staggering 7 to 7.5 million commuters. The figures touched 3,500 every year a few years ago—an average of ten lives lost every day—but declined to 2,468 in 2024 and 2,287 last year; another 2,500 people, on average, are injured every year in train accidents and incidents. The recent, the worst among them, was the Mumbra one in which commuters, forced to hang out of compartments in two trains going in opposite directions, brushed against each other and fell to their deaths. The Bombay High Court has called this entire situation an “alarming and disturbing” one.

Commuters falling off over-crowded trains is usually traced back to the railway authorities; commuter rage leading to the death is not. While personality traits and stressors can send anyone into a rage, is it only limited to that? Annoyance at trains being cancelled, irritation that regular trains are replaced by air-conditioned ones which everyone cannot board, and the resulting crowd on the platform and in the next regular train that follows are all systemic railway issues. Let’s not give the railways a free pass on these. Scheduling has been somewhat of a mess after the AC trains were introduced.

Then, there’s the lack of prompt medical aid and inordinate procedural delays in case of accidents, which forced Singh to be on the Malad platform when he should have been rushed to the nearest hospital. The vintage box, or broken plastic box, with expired bottles of disinfectant and some carelessly kept bandages, besides a cold stretcher to take bodies, is what passes for medical aid on most platforms. I can think of no other major city in the world having a transport system with a daily commuter population of 7 to 7.5 million without adequate and prompt medical facilities. This is a shame on the Indian Railways, especially because the situation has persisted for decades.

And the delays? Officials pass the buck, take their time to note down irrelevant details, wait for seniors, and do more of the same while the victim bleeds to death, literally. The less said about the investigation and the case, the better. In Singh’s case, the reason for the alacrity in investigation using the face recognition technology and Shinde’s arrest can be traced back to one catalyst—Singh’s father works in Union Minister Rajnath Singh’s team. The levers of power moved in ways in the railways that they would not for you and me.

They may be planning for additional lines and laying them at great cost and with enviable precision while managing thousands of trains with 3-minute intervals every day, but the question is, how sensitive and committed are the railways, both Western and Central, to Mumbai’s commuters, our needs, our grievances, and our pain points? Why must millions who leave home to go to work or study not be assured of a safer and more comfortable commute? How is any of this not a blot on the grand plans for India looking to be the USD 5 trillion economy by 2030, of which Maharashtra aims to be USD 1 trillion, with Mumbai and the larger Mumbai Metropolitan Region pulling in most of it?

Economics should not be the reason to provide safe, reliable, and comfortable public transport; it is ours by right. But the economic impetus should at least lead us to it. The metro network is not yet a patch on the numbers; it is not a public transit system. The BEST bus network is being steadily but surely choked to death. Even if every other mode of transport were to run at its peak, Mumbai cannot do without its suburban locals. But to use them is entirely and always at one’s own risk—it should never have to be so.

SMRUTI KOPPIKAR