Do floors at rly stations have to be ultra smooth?

Last week, I happened to travel by an overnight train starting from the Kalupur Railway Station in Ahmedabad. A day later, I returned in the morning to the same railway station. So, on two successive occasions, I had the opportunity to use the facilities at the railway station. Renovation work is on and there is some sort of construction activity going on almost everywhere at the railway station – the entrance, platforms, on the footbridge, etc. Such conspicuous actions to make a new, positive change is always welcome.

One thing I noticed was the ultra -smooth tiles being fitted at platform number one and the footbridge leading to all platforms. Similar construction might be going on at other places, but, I don't know about it. It was not a pleasurable experience to walk on these floors as I nearly slipped twice. I was lucky not to get hurt. I am not a clumsy walker and I do not have any problem with walking. My shoes were of good quality with quite a rough sole. No one had pushed me, and I had not stumbled on anyone's improperly-placed luggage. There was no oil spill – so many vehicles skid on roads if oil spills even in a small quantity – nor had water had spilt anywhere. On the parallel footbridge with the old flooring, I had no problem with walking steadily.

So, the problem was with a very smooth floor. One needs to ask the question as to the requirement of ultra smooth floors at railway stations. These are public places and the foremost factor to be considered while constructing them is 'safety'. In someone's personal property, any type of flooring – as smooth as glass or as rough as sandpaper – can be used as it is the choice of the owner. However, there are certain propriety and legal requirements to be taken care of in public places, and the ambit of administrative law is wide enough to hold the persons making these decisions legally accountable, besides the legal liability of the State, in this case, the Indian Railways.

One cannot simply make public places 'unsafe' by design. There can be arguments that accidents do happen, and people do fall while walking or running at railway stations. But, that doesn't mean that one designs a place for accidents to happen. Designs are expected to be foolproof as far as possible, to defeat Murphy's Law, which says that if a thing can go wrong, it will. And, that's why the best design of a manhole cover is circular as compared to a square shape. The square cover can fall inside the manhole as the diagonal of the square is larger than the side – simple application of the Pythagoras theorem – but the diameter of a circular cover is the same and it can never fall inside the manhole.

It is a well-known fact that walking on ice is very difficult. We are not talking about fresh snow, which is flaky and provides friction due to its flakiness and granular surface. This is the snow which solidifies into a thick sheet of ice, with a little bit of the top layer having melted, making it very slippery due to the drastic reduction in friction. This used to pose a big challenge for pedestrians and horse carriages in the late nineteenth century on both the sides of the Atlantic – in the United States and in Europe. Research at that time resulted in the grant of a patent in the US for a durable pavement about 150 years ago – the Nicholson pavement. A dispute related to this patent was finally decided by the US Supreme Court in 1878.

One expects that the railway station's floor's smoothness can be the subject of litigation in India in the present scenario of the Public Private Partnership (PPP) model being used for modernisation and upgradation of railway stations, especially in conjunction with the Smart City Mission. Modernisation does not mean approving unsafe material and design. The ultra smooth railway station floors are unsafe for common users and hazardous for senior citizens and persons having difficulty in walking.

Administrative decisions should be guided by the age-old adage: "Better safe than sorry".

The author is a professor at IIM-A, akagarwal@iima.ac.in