Metro installs guard rails on Kalighat station platform to prevent suicides
Times of India | 25 October 2024
Kolkata: Metro Railway has installed some guard rails at regular intervals on the platforms of Kalighat station as a measure to prevent suicides.
This is being done as an experiment, officials said. The guard rails will be removed if they prove ineffective or become a hazard for passenger movement, particularly during rush hours.
“We are trying this experiment for the safety of passengers.
There are gaps for the rake door opening,” a senior Metro Railway official told TOI on Thursday, which incidentally is the carrier’s 40th anniversary as India’s first rapid transit system. Suicide attempts on the North-South Metro, the city’s lifeline since its inception in 1984, are nothing new.
Only on Wednesday, a mother killed herself on the tracks of Chandni Chowk metro station, with her five-year-old daughter looking on. The unprecedented incident left Metro officials in a state of shock.
On Thursday, a senior Metro official said, “If one wants to die by suicide, only God can stop him or her. But the barricades might restrict the open space and thus reduce the number of suicide attempts.”
The barricades have been aligned to the doors of eight-car rakes. The gaps match the length of the doors, like the automatic platform screen doors (PSDs) in the East-West Metro (Green line).
Taking cognizance of the regular suicide attempts in India’s oldest metro (Blue Line), the futuristic East-West Metro (Green Line) was designed with full-height PSDs for underground stations and half-height platform screen gates (PSGs) for the elevated ones. The glass barriers between the metro track and the platforms open in sync with the train doors and prevent people from directly coming in contact with the train or falling on the tracks. But the upcoming Joka-Esplanade (Purple Line) and the New Garia-Airport (Orange Line) don’t have this crucial feature.
A proposal for introducing PSDs in the North-South Line was also mooted earlier.
But railway bosses turned it down, saying an automated train operation system is the basic requirement for installing PSDs and hence it wasn’t technically possible to have them on the North-South line.