Super Dense Crush Load

Anyone who has caught a Virar fast at 6 p.m. knows the posture. One hand on the bar above the door, one foot on the footboard, body leaning out into the wind, bag pressed against the stranger behind. It looks like bravado. For most of the people doing it, it is simply where the train had room.

The railways have an official-sounding name for that state of the carriage. They call it Super Dense Crush Load, and it means sixteen people standing on every square metre of floor.

How full is full

Sixteen people to a square metre is hard to picture. A square metre is about the floor under a small table, and sixteen adults cannot stand on it without pressing into each other from every side. At that density the only way more people fit is if some of them stop standing inside the train and start hanging off the outside of it.

The scale behind it is staggering. Mohammad Jamshed, a former member for traffic on the Railway Board, wrote in ThePrint in 2025 that the suburban network carried 7.56 million passengers a day in 2023-24. It runs nine, twelve and fifteen car trains on different sections. A fifteen-car rake carries 25 per cent more than a twelve, which is why the longer trains are always the first answer anyone proposes. Only about 80 services use air-conditioned rakes with doors that close. Across the whole of Indian Railways, Jamshed notes, 4,026 million of the 6,947 million passenger journeys that year were suburban, which means more than half of everyone the national railway carries is a commuter.

The count

The numbers come from the railways themselves. In an affidavit filed in the Bombay High Court in 2024, Indian Railways said that 51,802 people had died on the Mumbai suburban system between 2005 and 2024, and a similar number had been injured. Of those deaths, 22,481 were on Western Railway and 29,321 on Central. There were 2,590 deaths in 2023 and 2,468 in 2024.

That is about seven people a day. Jamshed points out that the figure used to be nearer fifteen a few decades ago, and the railways make the same point in their own defence. "It is incorrect that there is no sign of reducing the number of incidents," Western Railway told the High Court in August 2024. "The incidents have reduced despite huge increase in volume of traffic."

Both statements are true. Neither changes the fact that seven a day is more than 2,500 a year, on a single city's commuter railway.

Not every death is a fall from a crowded train. Many are people hit while crossing the tracks on foot, which is why every committee that has looked at the problem asks for bridges and fencing as well as trains.

Mumbra

On the morning of 9 June 2025, at 9.01, two fast trains passed each other on a curve near Mumbra station in Thane district, one heading down to Karjat and the other up to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus. Passengers were standing on the footboards of both. Like nearly every local in the city, both trains ran with their doors open.

"It is not a collision of trains," Central Railway's chief public relations officer, Swapnil Nila, told reporters. "People travelling on the footboard of a local train towards Kasara and those similarly travelling on a train going towards CSMT collided with each other and fell." The gap between the two trains was 1.5 to 2 metres, he said, "but at curves, a slight tilt happens." Their backpacks brushed. Thirteen people fell. Four were killed, among them Vicky Mukhyad, a constable with the Government Railway Police.

The politics arrived quickly, from every direction. The Chief Minister, Devendra Fadnavis, offered condolences and said the railway administration was investigating. His deputy, Eknath Shinde, promised a high-powered committee. The Congress state president, Harshwardhan Sapkal, said the dead had become "victims at the hands of the government". Sharad Pawar noted that on average six or seven people die every day after falling from local trains. Every one of those parties has held power in the state at some point in the twenty years the railways' own figures cover.

What the court said

A year earlier the Bombay High Court had already lost patience. Hearing a public interest petition in June 2024, Chief Justice Devendra Upadhyaya and Justice Amit Borkar told the railways they could not take credit for sheer volume. "You can't feel happy by proclaiming that you are commuting 35,00,000 people a day," the bench said. Passengers were being carried like "chattel or even worse". "I feel ashamed," the Chief Justice said, of the manner in which passengers were made to travel.

The court ordered a committee of experts and asked the general managers of both zonal railways to file affidavits through senior officers. The figures cited before it put Mumbai's rate at 33.8 deaths per 100,000 commuters, against 3.66 in New York and well under 2 in Paris and London.

The railways' reply, in part, was to ask the state government to stagger office and school hours. "The best possible solution is to stagger this office start time," Western Railway told the court. It is a sensible idea, and it depends on thousands of employers who answer to nobody on the railway.

The doors

The main fixes were written down years before Mumbra.

In 2017 Parliament's Public Accounts Committee called the scale of railway fatalities "really shocking", noted that Mumbai's suburban system accounted for 6,000 of 15,000 deaths in the period it examined, and recommended redesigning suburban coaches with automatic doors, moving to fifteen-car trains, and eliminating line crossings with foot overbridges, subways, fencing and boundary walls.

After Mumbra, the Ministry of Railways announced that all new rakes would have automatic doors and existing ones would be retrofitted. That is exactly what the Public Accounts Committee had asked for in 2017, eight years earlier. A door that shuts cannot have a man hanging out of it.

Automatic doors on a non-air-conditioned train raise real problems of ventilation and of how long a train sits at a platform while people squeeze in, and those are engineering questions with engineering answers. They are not reasons to have spent eight years deciding.

The commuters in the photograph above were standing on a train bound for Kalyan in 2006, on the line that runs through Mumbra. Nineteen years later, on the same route, the doors were still open.

Sources

• Mohammad Jamshed, "7 die daily on Mumbai trains due to overcrowding, trespassing. PAC's 2017 solutions ignored", ThePrint, 17 June 2025 (Super Dense Crush Load as 16 people per square metre; 7.56 million daily passengers in 2023-24; 9, 12 and 15 car rakes and the 25 per cent extra capacity of a 15-car rake; about 80 air-conditioned services; the railways' affidavit figure of 51,802 deaths from 2005 to 2024 and the split by zone; 2,590 deaths in 2023 and 2,468 in 2024; the fall from about 15 a day to 7; the 2017 PAC findings and recommendations; the ministry's announcement on automatic doors after Mumbra).
• The Tribune, "4 killed, 9 injured after falling off moving train in Maharashtra's Thane", June 2025 (the time and location of the Mumbra accident; the two trains; thirteen falling; four dead including GRP constable Vicky Mukhyad; the statements of Fadnavis and Shinde).
• ThePrint, "Mumbra train tragedy: Call for automated doors, more trains after at least 4 dead due to overcrowding", June 2025 (Swapnil Nila's statements on the footboard collision and the gap at curves; the remarks of Harshwardhan Sapkal and Sharad Pawar).
• LiveLaw, "Robust System Needed To Prevent Deaths Of Mumbai Local Train Commuters: Bombay High Court", 26 June 2024 (the bench of Chief Justice Devendra Upadhyaya and Justice Amit Borkar in Yatin Jadhav v Union of India; "35,00,000 people a day"; "chattel or even worse"; "I feel ashamed"; the committee of experts and affidavits; deaths per 100,000 commuters compared with New York, Paris and London).
• LiveLaw, "Over 23,000 Lives Lost In Mumbai Local Trains Since 20 Yrs, Making Continuous Efforts To Improve: Western Railways Tell Bombay High Court", August 2024 (Western Railway's statement that incidents have reduced despite rising traffic, and its call to stagger office start times).
• Wikimedia Commons, "Mumbai Suburban Railway passengers hanging off doors Mumbai India 17Aug2006" (the photograph of the Kalyan-bound train in August 2006).