A journey with migrants in an unreserved general coach on Coromandel Express

Migrant workers resume undertaking tough journeys to other States for work, travelling in cramped conditions on unreserved general coaches of the Coromandel Express and other trains. They push haunting images of the tragic train accident at the Bahanaga Bazar Railway Station at Balasore to the back of their minds.

For five hours, Srichandra Kumar, an 18-year-old from Gorakhpur district, Uttar Pradesh, has been confined to a cramped space in the passage near the toilet of the general-class unreserved coach on the 12841 Coromandel Express (Shalimar-Chennai Central). 

On June 13, the train chugs in at Balasore Railway Station. Now, Srichandra is to endure another 12 hours in the same uncomfortable position until he reaches Visakhapatnam, where he earns a living installing sliding aluminium glass windows. 

Images of the tragic train accident involving the Coromandel Express, which claimed the lives of 288 people at Bahanaga Bazar Railway Station, may well have been haunting his mind, but the determined migrant labourer Srichandra would have banished the lingering fear to the back of his mind as he boarded the train from Shalimar station in Kolkata.

His arduous journey actually began 30 hours ago when he boarded the Bagh Express from Basti Station in Gorakhpur district even without a proper seat, in order to catch the Coromandel Express from Shalimar. 

In the same coach on the Coromandel, Sumitra Singh (45) and seven members of her family have managed to grab two seats in Kharagpur. The other six find themselves squeezed into the nearly non-existent space in the aisle. Hailing from Narayangarh village in West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur district, the Singh family is heading to Visakhapatnam where they are to spend the next ten months doing menial work on a poultry farm

They are not alone. Chennai-bound Prafulla Majhi, a welder from Jharkhand’s East Singhbhum, has remainedstanding in the general coach for nearly two hours, awaiting his turn to sit on the floor after his companion is done with his nap.

Two general coaches of Coromandel Express were jam-packed on June 13, leaving little space for additional passengers boarding the train at Balasore, Bhadrak, Jajpur-Keonjhar Road, Cuttack and Bhubaneswar railway stations. A head-count performed in one of the coaches at Bhadrak station revealed it was carrying 225 passengers as against its seating capacity of 100.