Mumbai commuters have a harrowing Monday

Lakhs of commuters had a harrowing experience on Monday morning when the motormen of Central Railway (CR) suddenly decided not to work over and above their scheduled duty hours. This resulted in delay of trains by over an hour-and-a-half.

The motormen continued to work less, thereby disrupting the train schedule causing a bother to the common man.

Members of the recognised union claimed that they had not called for the strike and that some of the motormen in a fit of rage decided not to work beyond their scheduled hours of work.

This flash strike was to protest the delay in rescuing their colleague R Ramchandran, motorman of the Kalyan-bound slow local which rammed into the girder of the under-construction road-over-bridge which fell when his train was passing near Kopri in Thane.

Not only this but long hours of work was also one of their demands which they tried to press by highlighting the vacancies (over 150) be filled in by CR at the earliest.

The suburban rail traffic was thrown out of gear in the morning, the impact of which was felt till late in the evening on Monday. Commuters were caught unawares and were left stranded at various points on CR network leaving them no option but to walk to their destinations on the tracks.

Members of the recognised National Railway Mazdoor Union (NRMU) met CR general manager BB Modgil and presented a memorandum of their demands primarily asking to investigate into the death of their colleague Ramchandran along with the inquiry of the accident by the commissioner of railway safety.

Among their other demands was immediate action for the overhead bridges which have been declared dilapidated by various consultants. “There should be stress management sessions for the motormen and safety door must be provided to the motormen cabin as well in case of such an emergency,” said a member of NRMU.

Modgil has assured to look into all these issues and the motormen have decided to resume their services as normal.

The incident had a major impact on the train services on the harbour line as the trains were lined up one behind the other.

The administration, however, attributed the delay of train services to a bomb hoax incident which happened at Dombivali at 7.45am.

“We had to immediately stop all the train operations thereby leading to a lot of bunching and rescheduling of the suburban trains. This had a cascading effect throughout the day as the delay was for over 45 minutes,” said SC Mudgerikar, chief PRO of CR.