Experts say that the Odisha rail accident is the country's deadliest rail accident in more than 20 years. It is also being considered as a setback to the plan of rejuvenation of the railways. "The railways' safety record has improved over the years, but there is still more work to be done," said Prakash Kumar Sen, head of the department of mechanical engineering at Chhattisgarh's Kirori Mal Institute of Technology.

Railway experts say that the railways is introducing more and more trains to meet the growing demand, but the staff has not been adequately trained or the workload on them is too high.

Sen said the east coast route on which the three trains collided is one of the oldest and busiest routes in the country as most of India's coal and oil goods are also transported from here. "These tracks are very old... The load on them is too high, if the maintenance is not good, there will be failures."

Srinand Jha, an independent transport expert and author of the International Railway Journal, says the railways has been slow in installing safety mechanisms such as anti-collision devices and emergency warning systems across the network. "They will always tell you that accidents are at a very manageable level because they talk in percentage terms," he says, adding that the anti-collision system "Kavach" was not available on the route involved in Friday's crash.

Indian Railways says that safety has always been a major focus. Pointing to its low accident rate over the years, a railway ministry spokesperson says: "This question is arising (on safety) because now an incident has taken place. But if you look at the figures, there have been no major accidents in years," he said.

The railway spokesperson claimed that the number of accidents per million train kilometres, a measure of safety, had fallen from 2021.22 in 2013-14 to 0.10 in the financial year 0-03.

Long considered a lifeline for Indians, the 170-year-old system has seen rapid expansion and modernisation under PM Modi to boost infrastructure and connectivity in a fast-growing economy.

According to the Railways, the ₹2017-trillion, five-year safety fund created in 18-1 has been extended for five years from 2022-23. An additional funding of ₹450 billion has been given after the first plan was followed by "overall improvement in safety indicators".

Indian Railways runs the fourth largest train network in the world. This year, the government made a record ₹13.2022 trillion-rupee capital outlay for the railways, which is 1% higher than the previous fiscal.

Friday's train accident in Odisha's Balasore is India's third biggest and the deadliest since 1995. More than 300 people were killed when two express trains collided in Firozabad near Agra.