…The 2 June 2023 tragedy was one of the Indian Railways’ worst ever, killing 290 people and injuring at least 1,000…

The “general dabba” or unreserved coach of the Coromandel Express was, in recent years, a pipeline of men looking for work in southern India, bolstering one of the country’s several well-established migration corridors for informal labour…

From the accounts of nearly a dozen passengers in the unreserved and non air-conditioned sleeper coaches of the ill-fated Coromandel Express, a picture emerged of this large segment of India's informal workforce: Those with minor to moderate injuries lamented the cost of medical care, not having health coverage from the state or their employers. Those advised diagnostic scans paid Rs 6,000 to Rs 8,000 for these, for many nearly a third of their monthly income. Each of them forfeited weeks of income in the absence of any kind of paid leave.

… Railways could have added coaches to trains in the months when migration peaked, data and enumeration can make a huge change in providing social security to migrant workers across the country, he [Chandan Kumar of the Working People’s Coalition, a collective of labour unions] said…