Human errors and slow deployment of the “Kavach system” continue to pose challenges for the Indian Railways, experts said in the wake of the June 17 mishap involving Kanchanjunga Express.
“The cost of installing Kavach is exorbitant which is affecting its deployment. The devices used in the system have limited approved vendors and it’s difficult to produce these devices on a mass scale which is required if the Railways has to cover its entire 68,000 route km network,” said the former railway official, seeking anonymity.
The systemic problems persist even as safety-related expenditure has shot up significantly in the past few years.
As per estimates, it costs about Rs 50 lakh per km to deploy track-side infrastructure while the cost of Kavach equipment on loco is around Rs 70 lakh per loco.
To be sure, Kavach (armour) is an indigenously developed automatic train protection (ATP) system. Its orgin is traced to train collision avoidance system developed over a decade ago.
The Budget FY23 made an outlay for implementation of Kavach across 2,000 km of track, and the plan is to istall it across 34,000 km track of the Golden Quadrilateral rail route, by FY28.
On Tuesday, a day after the accident in West Bengal’s Darjeeling district, officials in railways ministry highlighted the safety measures taken by the government over the past 10 years. In a note, the railways ministry said that between 2014 and 2024, the national transporter has spent Rs 1.78 trillion on safety-related projects which is 2.5 times than the corresponding investment (Rs 70,273 crore) between 2004 and 2014, a period of the UPA government. This is partly attributable to inflation and the economic growth over the years that boosts railway earnings and expenditure in absolute terms.
The heightened investments, as the note said, have resulted in the visible reduction in accidents. For instance, the average number of accidents in 2014-24 period dropped by 60% to 68 accidents per year as compared to 171 accidents per year in 2004-14 period.
The note further adds that the railways has taken a multi-pronged approach to minimise the accidents in the recent years. For instance, the Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK), which was introduced in FY18 with a corpus of Rs 1 trillion for five years, has been used for replacement, renewal and upgradation of critical safety assets. Under the first phase of RRSK, the total expenditure stood at Rs 1.08 trillion. In FY23, the safety fund was extended for another 5 years with a gross budgetary support of Rs 45,000 crore.
In order to prevent train accidents, the railways developed Kavach, an indigenous automatic train protection (ATP) system which was developed by Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) in partnership with the industry. In the February interim budget, the allocation for Kavach was slightly reduced to Rs 560 crore as against a budgetary allocation of Rs 710 crore in FY24.
So far, this system has been deployed across 1,465 km of rail tracks while the track-side work has been completed for about 6,000 km. Additionally, the ministry is planning to issue tenders for another 10,000 km soon. The railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently said that the Kavach system has been granted patent.
As per railways officials, the installation of Kavach is complex. For instance, there are six stages of deployment such as laying of optical fibre cable along railway tracks, installing telecom towers along the tracks, installing telecom equipment on the towers and on trains, setting up data centres at stations and integrating them with signal system and installing equipment on locomotives and trains, etc.
“The continuous focus is on to further enhance safety measures. Track-related improvements, signalling-related improvements, locomotive- and train-related improvements are part of this endeavour. Training of loco pilots, loco inspectors, and station masters is also top priority items. The simulators are being introduced for better training,” the note said.
While the inquiry into the June 17 mishap – that killed 10 people and injured 50 – is slated for Wednesday, some reports suggest that the goods trains that rammed into the Kolkata-bound Kanchanjunga Express was allowed to ignore the red signal since the signalling system was not functioning.
