A passenger train crashed into a cargo carrier in central India on Tuesday, killing at least eight people and injuring many more, a senior government official said.
The accident took place near Bilaspur, some 116km from Raipur, the capital city of Chhattisgarh state.
Television footage showed the mangled first carriage of the passenger train partially perched atop the last carriage of the goods train, as police and rescue teams tried to pull out survivors and a crowd watched from the parallel tracks.
The local passenger train crashed into the goods train from behind and toppled over some of its coaches, a senior government official, Sanjay Agarwal, said.
“Rescue team is trying to cut through the train to take out a few passengers trapped inside,” he told the news agency Associated Press.
Deputy chief minister Arun Sao confirmed that the goods train was stationary at the time of the accident and the passenger train rammed into it from behind, wrecking a few of its front carriages.
In a statement, the Indian Railways said it had moved all its resources for rescuing and shifting the injured to local hospitals for treatment. It said an inquiry into the cause of the accident had been launched.
India's railway network is the fourth largest in the world and is undergoing a $30bn transformation with new trains and modern stations.
But train collisions aren’t uncommon in the country as the rail network is beset with problems of aging infrastructure and human error.
More than 12 million people travel on India's 14,000 trains every day across 64,000km of track. In spite of government efforts over the years to improve railway safety, several hundred accidents, some deadly, occur annually and are often blamed on human error or outdated signalling systems.
A crash in eastern India in 2023 killed over 280 people in what was one of the country’s deadliest train disasters.
