Possibly, if a 2012 report suggesting major changes to the existing railway network in India had been implemented. With E Sreedharan of Delhi Metro fame and eminent nuclear scientist Anil Kakodkar on a panel examining railway safety, the report was a landmark one for Indian Railways.

To overhaul one of the largest and busiest rail networks in the world, that too with a century-old infrastructure, is no mean task. And the suggestions of the panel were radical: 

• Overhaul cost: Rs 1 lakh crore 
• Time to implement: 5 years
• In store for public: No new trains, considerable fare hike, new railway cess

Above everything, what it said was needed was the undertaking of not-so-populist measures. No wonder that railway minister after minister put the report in the cold storage. The current minister Suresh Prabhu finally offered some hope when he announced in February 2016 that he would implement it.

Let’s take a look at how the report was commissioned and what its key recommendations were:

• It was Trinamool Congress’ Dinesh Trivedi who, as railway minister in 2011, took the initiative and tasked a committee headed by Kakodkar to come up with ways to make railways accident-free
• In February 2012, the panel submitted its bare-all, scathing 160-page report. It was a slap on the face of successive governments for their populist measures of not hiking fares while increasing the strain on the network
• The passengers were surviving on sheer luck and the network was on the brink of collapse, it concluded
• Here is what it suggested: Adoption of an Advanced Signalling System (akin to the European Train Control System) costing Rs 20,000 crore, both manned and unmanned level crossings to be totally eliminated at a cost Rs 50,000 crore and a switch over from the ICF design coaches to the much safer LHB design coaches costing Rs 10,000 crore. And yes, no new trains

What became of the report?

• Trivedi was quite serious about executing it and went on to hike fares in his 2012-13 rail budget. This invited the wrath of party supremo Mamata Banerjee and the tussle prompted Trivedi to resign a month later
• Mukul Roy took over the ministry in April and brushed the report under the carpet. 
• “Anybody can submit a report but it is not sacrosanct,” he declared, and rolled back the fare hike
• The successive railway ministers from the Congress party continued to ignore the report because they felt it benefited the Trinamool. 
• The report received a new lease of life with a change of government in May 2014 when the new railway minister Sadanand Gowda reopened it.
• But before he could do any further, he was replaced in November by Suresh Prabhu who has promised to take it forward. 

But what has Prabhu done?

Prabhu has shown keenness in implementing it, but then he is neither the first nor would be the last railway minister to pick safety as the key agenda

However, the one thing that sets Prabhu apart is his willingness to go beyond populist measures. He changed the rules of the game dramatically when in his 2015 rail budget, he became the first rail minister ever to not announce a single new train or a new railway line, emphasising the need to fix the existing ones first

In February 2016, Prabhu announced he would implement a large part of recommendations in the report. Two months later, he created a create a Rs 1 lakh crore safety fund named Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh for the purpose.

This fund, however has not got the finance ministry’s approval and has been a major roadblock.

Is it the end of it? Not really, because in September, Prabhu announced major hikes in passenger fares in premium trains that, expectedly, drew protests from all over

But unless we see solid action on the ground, there is no point patting Prabhu’s back for good intentions alone. And action is what India needs, so that a disaster like the one in Kanpur doesn’t claim passengers’ lives again.