A Tragedy That Should Never Have Happened The recent train accident at the Alapakkam railway crossing in Tamil Nadu is a heart-rending reminder of how institutional failures and human negligence can turn an ordinary day into an everlasting tragedy. The victims — school-going children with their whole lives ahead of them — perished in an incident that was entirely preventable. Among others, one aspired to be a doctor, another a civil servant — dreams now cruelly extinguished due to systemic lapses. Each child killed was a universe of potential. The pain of the parents — who saw their children off to school expecting them to return — is beyond quantification. For them, the memory of that morning will never fade, and their grief will remain lifelong. When young lives are cut short due to institutional failure, the loss is not only personal but a profound moral failure of society. This accident, involving a school van and an oncoming train, was not an unforeseeable ...