Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif ordered an inquiry into a train accident in Karachi and sought punishment for those found responsible.The Prime Minister directed immediate rescue and relief activities to save lives of those stranded and critically injured persons and called for best medical treatment for them.He expressed deep grief and sorrow over the loss of precious lives and prayed for eternal peace of the departed souls.He also prayed for the swift recovery of the injured.As many as 22 people, including seven women and two children, were killed and over 65 injured, some of them seriously, when a speeding Zakaria Express rammed into the stationary Fareed Express in Qadafi Town near the Landhi train station early Thursday morning, Pakistan Railways and health officials said.Emergency was declared in Karachi’s major hospitals and ambulances of private welfare organisations rushed to the spot. However, people from nearby areas pulled out the dead and injured from the wreckage of damaged trains on self-help basis while ambulances took around 30-40 minutes in reaching the site of the accident and took another 30 minutes in transporting the injured to the Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Center (JPMC).Joint Executive Director of JPMC Dr. Seemin Jamali said they initially received three bodies and ‘dozens’ of injured from the train accident site but the number jumped to 17 dead within a couple of hours. Later, five more patients died during treatment at the hospital.She said they were already on a high alert due to a fire on a ship at the Gadani Shipbreaking Yard a couple of days ago, which had killed around 20 persons and injured over 60. Other hospital officials blamed the dilapidated roads and heavy vehicular traffic, lack of any dedicated ambulance lane on the city roads and absence of any health facilities in Landhi area for the high death toll in the train incident.Some of the injured of the train incident were also taken to the Sindh Social Security Hospital in Landhi but due to lack of advanced treatment facilities, trained and qualified doctors and paramedics, they were moved to the JPMC after first aid. Federal Railways Minister Saad Rafiq, while announcing Rs1.5 million compensation for the heirs of those who died in the incident and Rs350,000 for injured patients, said a board of inquiry led by Federal Inspector of Railways Mian Arshad would probe into the incident and fix the responsibility.The strict action should be taken against those who are involved in negligence.Poorly maintained tracks and carriages on top of decades-long corruption have significantly increased the frequency of rail accidents, which often set forth terrible tolls of dead and injured civilians. The railway accidents are quite common yet increasingly lethal in Pakistan should have long resulted in an extensive audit of the infrastructure as well as its emergency mechanisms. In addition to an immediate identification of all faults in the system that largely include unmanned crossings, obsolete engines, ill-maintained tracks and mismanaged bogies, it is high time that the authorities partake in a thorough modernisation of Pakistan Railways. The government should make significant changes in the system and should collaborate with the private sector in schemes that aim to repair the present infrastructure with the comfort of passengers as the end goal.
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