On June 9, 2025, a horrific rail collision in one of Mumbai’s suburban trains killed four passengers and injured six other passengers. The reports indicate that the passengers were thrown off a packed train on the Central Railway line between Thane and Kalyan during the morning rush hours. The fatalities revived long-standing fears about safety, overloading, and the infrastructure of one of the planet’s busiest suburban rail networks.
Context
According to officials, the incident occurred when one of the trains made a sharp turn while traveling between Diva and Mumbra stations, causing the passengers on the footboards of the trains to bump into each other due to the sudden jerk and fall off the moving trains. Four people died and nine others were injured after several passengers fell from two overcrowded moving trains near Mumbra railway station in Thane early Monday morning.
Passengers are said to have fallen at around 9 am when a Kasara-bound train started at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) was passing through the Diva-Mumbra area. The passengers hanging off the footboard of this train collided with passengers hanging off the footboard of a train that was travelling towards CSMT in the opposite direction. This is how the passengers felt.
Impacts
The loss of four lives results in immeasurable pain to their families, but also points to the dangers that millions of Indians face every day. As an outcome of experience, psychological stress, physical injury, and fear of travel are now a part of the commuting experience. This is especially problematic for affected individuals, and may impact their productivity in a workplace, particularly for lower- and middle-income individuals whose only means of travel is public transport.
On the level of the community that has been impacted by the deaths, the trust that citizens place in a public transport system can be diminished. This, then, may have the unintended consequence of shifting more citizens to private means of automobile use and thereby increasing traffic congestion and air pollution, further burdening a city already struggling with environmental stressors such as air pollution.
We need to question our idea that daily passengers will always be able to risk their lives because they don’t have good alternatives. The Railways and state government times report that their ability to operate trains is limited by infrastructure, and while that situation is ever changing, and I acknowledge that the level of commuter traffic is very high, periodic safety failures can never be justified by circumstances the frequency of this failure continues to occur is not acceptable.
Passenger safety will always be the joint responsibility of the Indian Railways and the transportation system designers/service providers (policymakers that approve budgets) that develop the system, including; lack of fast trains, poor last mile connectivity, and a poor level of integration between modes of transport, which are contributing to the congestion.
Moreover, despite the Railways being frequently short of funds, the Union Budget 2025-26 allocated ₹2.4 lakh crore for the Railway sector. The issue is whether enough of this will go to the suburban segments, and whether the long-term infrastructure projects such as the Mumbai Urban Transport Projects (MUTP) are taking too much time to implement in order to address current demands.
As explained by the Government Railway Police (GRP), the passengers fell due to a sudden jerk. Since they were hanging on the footboards of the two trains, they collided with each other and fell.
“This accident happened because of the collision between the passengers hanging out.”
In the aftermath of the accident, the Railway Board have decided that any trains that are manufactured for the Mumbai suburban area will automatically close their doors. Rakes which are already in service, will also be modified to incorporate this feature.
The Mumbra collision cements the time-tested outcomes of usual overcrowding and lack of care for safety on the suburban railways in Mumbai. I am excited by the implementation of automatic doors and improved, modernised rakes to improve safety, but this needs to happen swiftly and openly, and not at the expense of the fare-paying customers. The system requires a big picture overhaul, as well as improvements to infrastructure, operations, policy systems, and passenger behaviour, if we want to meaningfully reduce deaths every day.
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