[S.K. Singh, the deputy magistrate of the
Saharsa District, said 37 people were confirmed dead, including several
children. India’s railway minister, Mallikarjun Kharge, said 28 had died, and
noted that the pilgrims were crossing the tracks illegally. Parliamentary
discussion on Monday afternoon deteriorated into a shouting match over whether
the government bore responsibility.]
By Ellen
Barry
 |
| Aftermath of Indian Train Accident: Video of the burning Rayja Rani Express train, which was set on fire by a mob after running over a group of Hindu pilgrims. |
An enraged
crowd dragged out the driver and began beating him, and set parts of the train
on fire, sending up a pillar of thick black smoke that could be seen miles
away.
The crowd
remained so furious that hours passed before firefighters and rescue workers
were able to approach the site of the accident, officials said. A train sent to
help the wounded was forced to halt on the tracks a mile away.
The disaster
stood out even in a season of terrible accidents.
The station was
a remote one — inaccessible by road — and the high-speed Rayja Rani Express
typically barrels through without stopping at a speed of around 50 miles an
hour. Railway officials said the driver had been given clearance to pass
through.
But Monday was
the last day of a holy month in India, and hundreds of people were disembarking
from two stopped passenger trains while on their way to a temple a half-mile
away to offer holy water to Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
A top official
at the railway ministry, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, said the driver had pulled the
emergency brake when he saw people on the tracks but was unable to stop the
train.
“It was all
quite frightening,” said Rohit Kumar, a passenger, who jumped off the train and
ran for a quarter-mile to the nearest station when the crowd began to attack.
“I’m standing here and watching smoke billowing out from the train. It was
nightmarish. So scary.”
S.K. Singh, the
deputy magistrate of the Saharsa District, said 37 people were confirmed dead,
including several children. India’s railway minister, Mallikarjun Kharge, said
28 had died, and noted that the pilgrims were crossing the tracks illegally.
Parliamentary discussion on Monday afternoon deteriorated into a shouting match
over whether the government bore responsibility.
The chief
minister of Bihar, the state where the disaster occurred, called it “the rarest
of rare tragedies.” He pledged 200,000 rupees, or around $3,180, to the
victims’ families, and urged the railway ministry to do the same. Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh released a statement calling for “calm in the area so
that the relief and rescue operations can be carried out without any
hindrance.”
The station,
Dhamara Ghat, was inaccessible by car because of the current flood season, so
rescue workers had to walk more than two miles from the nearest road to reach
the injured, a regional police spokesman said.
A series of
disasters have befallen pilgrims in India this year. In June, thousands drowned
when flash floods struck the northern state of
Uttarakhand, and the Indian authorities evacuated more than 100,000 people. In
February, dozens were killed in a train-station stampede at the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu religious
festival on the banks of the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers.
[The rankings, released Thursday by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, also put California Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Columbia University; the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford in the top 10. The best ranked universities in the Asia-Pacific region were the University of Tokyo, ranked 21st; Kyoto University, at 26th, and the University of Melbourne, at 56th.]
Foreign Education Costliest
in Australia, Report Finds
Australia is the most expensive country for
foreign students to pursue a higher education, surpassing the United States and Britain, a report by HSBC has
found.
Average annual tuition fees for foreign students
in Australia and the United States are roughly the same, about $25,000, the
report, released last week, found, but a higher cost of living pushed Australia
to the top of the list. A year of study in Australia costs about $38,000 when
living expenses are factored in, while foreign students in the United States
pay around $35,000. Britain ranked third, with an average cost of about
$30,000.
The research by HSBC was compiled from public
data in 13 countries. Fees were calculated from the average cost of tuition for
foreign students at the 10 largest institutions in each country. Cost of living
data came from HESA Global Education Rankings 2010, the Expatistan index and
HSBC’s own research and were adjusted for inflation.
Of the 13 countries surveyed, the most
affordable place to study was Germany, with an average of $6,200 a year in
tuition and living expenses. In Asia, Singapore and Hong Kong are the most
expensive for overseas students, who pay about $24,000 annually in Singapore
and $22,000 in Hong Kong. — GRACE TSOI
Harvard Ranked Top
University in the World; Stanford is No. 2
Harvard University is the top institution of
higher education in the world, according to the 2013 Academic
Ranking of World Universities, followed by Stanford University; the
University of California, Berkeley; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and the University of Cambridge.
The rankings, released Thursday by the Center
for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, also put
California Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Columbia University;
the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford in the top 10. The best
ranked universities in the Asia-Pacific region were the University of Tokyo,
ranked 21st; Kyoto University, at 26th, and the University of Melbourne, at
56th.
The study surveyed more than 1,200 universities
worldwide on the basis of six indicators, including the number of alumni and
faculty who had received Nobel Prizes and
Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers and publications, and per
capita performance. — ANNE-SOPHIE BOLON
Poll finds British Colleges
Meet Students’ Standards
Eighty-five percent of undergraduate students in
Britain are satisfied with their higher education, according to the ninth
annual National Student
Survey, whose results were published last week.
The survey of about 300,000 undergraduates in
their final year of studies represented a response rate of 68.6 percent of
eligible students. The study, in which a small number of institutions did not
participate, was carried out by Ipsos MORI and commissioned by the Higher
Education Funding Council for England, a government body. It is designed to
guide prospective students as well as to provide feedback on higher education
institutions. Students reported a slight increase in satisfaction over previous
years in categories including assessment and feedback, academic support,
organization and management, learning resources and student unions.
The University of Bath was at the top of the
list, with 94 percent of its students expressing satisfaction. The universities
of Buckingham, East Anglia, Essex, Keele and St. Andrews all received an
approval rating of 93 percent. The University of Cambridge received a 92
percent satisfaction rate, as did the Open University and the University of
Surrey. The University of Oxford was just behind at 91 percent, tied with the
University of Exeter and Newman University, Birmingham. The survey comes on the
heels of a study by the country’s Higher Education Statistics Agency that found
that 86.4 percent of recent British graduates had either found jobs or were
continuing their studies. — CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE
