Risk factor

Railways too must carefully assess duty hours

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The disruption in IndiGo’s schedule after the enforcement of Flight Duty Time Limitation (FDTL) norms has revived a longstanding but unresolved concern in Indian Railways of how fatigue among loco pilots is managed, and what this means for safety on an increasingly busy network.

Loco pilots continue to operate under the far looser “Hours of Work and Period of Rest” (HOER) framework, which permits an average of 52 working hours a week. The All India Loco Running Staff Association’s demand is to cap duty at six hours for passenger trains and eight hours for goods trains, along with 16 hours of rest after every trip, weekly rest in addition to daily rest, and the use of fatigue-risk modelling in crew scheduling. These proposals must be carefully studied. They broadly reflect the global best practices, where duty and rest rules are based on scientific evidence of how fatigue affects human performance.