The medical students had no transfusion equipment. The people of Gaisal flagged down vehicles on the nearby highway to carry victims to hospitals in surrounding towns. At one of them, in Islampur, victims from the crash lay screaming on the floor as hospital staff struggled to deal with the number of injured. At Siliguri Medical College, where most of the dead were taken, social worker Aniruddha Sengupta was helping the bereaved identify their kin. They cannot even be photographed.
Identification is impossible.
By daybreak, as news of the disaster began to filter out to the rest of India, there was a scramble to assign blame. Railways Minister Nitish Kumar surprised the country by resigning, saying the accident was a case of criminal negligence. Trade unions said it was a mechanical fault. As an official investigation into the crash got under way, India's Railway Board, the industry's supervisory body, suspended five senior managers from the northeast regional railway system, in whose territory the collision took place. But there was little that India's railway officials could do to restore public confidence in a network that has been deteriorating for over three decades.