Railway officials say that climate and security considerations translate into barred windows for non-airconditioned coaches — each coach has an emergency exit on either side — so the effort has to be to ensure that the interiors are fire-retardant.

Consider the seriousness with which the Railways treated this. In 2005, it entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with French national railways, SNCF, seeking technical assistance to manufacture “fire-retardant” coaches. Having fire-retardant material helps in slowing down the fire, reduces toxicity and allows passengers time to escape. The first phase in the French offer included computer simulation of coaches to test how fire-retardant these were. But so long did the Railways sleep over this offer that its validity expired.

It was only recently that the Railways’ Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) in Lucknow got a Rs 96-lakh estimate worked out to revive the offer and pushed it through the Ministry in a bid to get it cleared this Budget.

This isn’t the only instance of Rail Bhawan’s casual approach when it comes to fire-safety. A proposal to set up a fire-testing laboratory at RDSO to facilitate testing of fire-retardancy on coaches is still entangled in bureaucratic maze, awaiting clearance.

The RDSO, the nodal agency involved in the development of fire-retardant features for coaches, claims to have frozen detailed upgraded specifications for fire-retardant curtain cloth, upholstery cloth, floor board, pre-laminated shaded sheets, foam, PVC floor and rexine.

“In the last three years, around 3,600 coaches manufactured here have had some kind of fire-retardant features or the other,” said Rail Coach Factory Kapurthala’s General Manager S K Suri. Clearly, the two coaches of the Samjhauta Express were not among them.