Chink in Mumbai's local train armour

FAILED DRILL: The two-day drill was aborted in a day because the crowd grew out of control.

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Keywords: Drill, Security

Mumbai: Mumbai's Churchgate station is one of the busiest across the country with around 10 lakh passengers passing through every day and at peak hour, no one has a moment to waste.

However, on Monday evening at 1700 hrs IST, the crowd met a road block of metal detectors and a wall of policemen.

It was perhaps the single largest security drill undertaken by the Railways after the 7/11 blast and the aim of the experiment was to find out whether it is possible to implement fool -proof security.

The south gate of Churchgate station is ground zero. The security was everywhere - western entrances, eastern gates, corner alleys and even an X-ray machine.

Caught in the middle of all of this was the average commuter, like 30-year-old Jaywanth Sadanand, who was frisked from head to toe.

"This manuual frisking will not happen. It's just too tedious, it cannot be done all the time," was all he had to say.

And his opinion was shared by many others including a 20-year-old college student Kanchan, who says she had to stand in line for almost 15 minutes to get over with the frisking.

With an anxious crowd waiting to go home, the situation was simply unmanageable.

Divisional Railway Manager, Satya Prakash, says, "We could carry out the check for only about ten minutes because the crowd grew out of control and it was just too much."

As a result, the experiment which was supposed to go on for another day has been aborted.

(With inputs from Vineeta Rao)