Indian lawmakers called for the railway minister to resign yesterday, a day after two passenger trains hurtled head-on into each other killing at least 38 people and wounding dozens. Yesterday, another inter-state train ran into a jeep at a railway crossing in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu killing five people travelling in the car, an official said. Opposition deputies slammed the government for the spate of accidents on one of the world’s largest rail networks and demanded Railway Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav accept responsibility and resign.

“When there was an accident during our government, the railway minister had offered to resign. Where is the railway minister now?” former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee asked in the lower house of parliament amid noisy protests. “Shame, shame,” MPs from Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party shouted before trooping out of the chamber in protest. Yadav was not in parliament at the time. Several coaches went off the tracks when the Jammu Tawi express crashed into a local train near Mukerian town in Punjab state on Tuesday.

A railway spokesman told Reuters that the death toll from the accident had risen to 38, and 53 people were in hospital with injuries. Another official said two station masters had been suspended for alleged dereliction of duty and the railways had filed a police report to bring charges of criminal neglect against them. But newspapers and commentators said successive governments had failed to upgrade the railways’s vital infra-structure, and safety standards had been falling over the decades. Sanjeev Miglani