कोशिश गोल्ड - मुक्त
BLOOD on the TRACKS
The Caravan
|October 2025
Why nearly a hundred track maintainers die on the job every year

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.
यह कहानी The Caravan के October 2025 संस्करण से ली गई है।
हजारों चुनिंदा प्रीमियम कहानियों और 10,000 से अधिक पत्रिकाओं और समाचार पत्रों तक पहुंचने के लिए मैगज़्टर गोल्ड की सदस्यता लें।
क्या आप पहले से ही ग्राहक हैं? साइन इन करें
The Caravan से और कहानियाँ

The Caravan
Ehtesham Siddiqui: “I got my freedom but there is pain”
An accused in the 2006 Mumbai train bombings reflects on his exoneration
17 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
Category Mistake
The Sonbhadra massacre and the violence of misclassification / Communities
5 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
UNCERTAIN TERMS
THE QUESTIONS EMERGING FROM NEPAL'S GEN Z PROTESTS
22 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
BLOOD on the TRACKS
Why nearly a hundred track maintainers die on the job every year
36 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
Stranger than Fiction
Writing in the aftermath of the Police Action in Hyderabad
19 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
KARNATAKA'S URBAN PROMISE: PRACTICAL PLANS FOR BETTER CITY LIFE
From secure housing layouts and restored lakes to continuous water supply, affordable canteens and improved mobility, Karnataka is reshaping the everyday fabric of city life.
10 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
India's Conservative Revolution
Where the postcolonial Left meets the Hindu Right
18 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
Type Caste
The Sangh's century of moulding men
6 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
Catching Strays
Dogs become the latest target of India's mob mentality/Politics
6 mins
October 2025

The Caravan
The Exquisite Art of Failure
An excerpt from Mother Mary Comes to Me
6 mins
October 2025
Listen
Translate
Change font size