PAKISTAN Railways has become synonymous with the image of a decaying organisation: accident-prone, loss-making and inefficient. Not many are willing to admit that mismanagement, unsteady wagons, rickety tracks and 18th-century mindset have reduced the Railways to a near-death existence. Even when it reluctantly continues to chug, rattle and rumble, everyone knows that it is managed and operated in a way not much different from a lorry adda across the road. The only option left seems to lie in the old Dal(ota Indian tribal wisdom: ‘When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
Pal(istan Railways has simply run out of steam. A meltdown was only natural.
Managerially, technically and financially bankrupt, it finds it impossible to transport passengers and goods safely and efficiently. It is headed by a bureaucrat and a politician. While declaring a railway emergency, the only actions the minister in charge could think of were punishments received by schoolchildren. Come to work on Sundays, no leave for three months, send daily reports (homeworl() to the ministry and use trains for travelling on duty.
Even a novice would immediately figure out the pointlessness of these measures. A better informed and competent management would have suggested identifying root causes, taking actions to prevent their recurrence and verifying them for their effectiveness.
Imagine a railway in the year 2026 that cannot use even a basic email system for its routine internal and external communication (a disease proudly shared by the entire government of Pakistan.) Reportedly, an experimental email was recently sent to 40 senior officials of the Railways. Thirty-nine never responded, while one was responded to by a clerk saying that a reply was not possible due to the absence ofthe boss.
Compare the sense of responsibility and ethics that differentiate Pal(istan Railways from the rest of the world.
Following the train derailment at Hatfield, UK on Oct 17, 2000, which killed four passengers, the Railtrack CEO Gerald Corbett took less than 24 hours to tender his resignation. Mohsen Aghaie, the head of the Iranian Railways was quick to resign after a train collision that 1(illed 44 people in Iran in November 2016, describing his departure as a matter of social responsibility and sympathy for the survivors.
Pal(istan Railways, on the other hand, met with 448 railway disasters between 2021 and 2025,leaving169 dead and over 400 injured or crippled for life. Not a singleRailways chairman even remotely contemplated a resignation. There is no record of any official above grade 19 ever having been held accountable. No wonder the lack of accountability has helped the Railways perfect the art of digging progressively deeper pits and incurring bigger losses each year. It incurred a financial loss of Rs47.49 billion in 2022, Rs48.2bn in 2023, Rs51.38bn in 2024 and RsG1.19bn in 2025.
What crime have the people of Pakistan committed to carry such loss-making and life-extracting burden on their shoulders? Track-related derailments, unmanned crossings and train collisions are the three most cited reasons for the repeated railway accidents. Pakistan Railways management has been negligent of not addressing these issues. A quick root cause analysis and effective corrective actions could have fixed these issues for good. Not equipped to either thinl( or act on modern professional lines, it has finally come to an expected dead end.
Can a clueless bureaucratic structurethat allows human waste to fall directly on railway tracks, from stationary and moving trains, be entrusted to undertake the task of running a Railways system? Pakistan Railways needs toreplace its current setup with a completely non-political, non-bureaucratic and professional management. It needs a worldclass occupational health and safety system. It needs a proactive hazard identification and risk assessment programme to fix its fragile tracks, its 1,416 unmanned crossings, and its archaic communication system.
For all this, the Railways does not need billions of dollars. It needs billions of neurons. Every developed country’s railway has a system called Occupational Health and Safety Management System based on national or international standards such as ISO 45001.
Pakistan Railways appears to have no clue of any such system. Being an occupational health and safety engineer, may I humbly offer to spend two months (as an entirely pro bono activity) to help Pal(istan Railways set up such a world-class safety management system. The writer is an industrial engineer and a volunteer social activist.
naeemsadiq@gmail.com