Railway Minister reviews 'Kavach', India’s first anti-collision system for trains

On World Safety Day, Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw conducted a live testing of Kavach, an indigenously developed, automatic protection technology for trains.

The test involved two trains travelling towards each other at full speed and halting automatically once it noticed the opposing train on the same line within a prescribed distance. The minister was at Secunderabad to take part in the trial, and have a first-hand experience of Kavach.

'Kavach', which literally means armour, is being promoted by the Railways as the world's cheapest automatic train collision protection system.

Kavach system enables the trains to stop on their own if the digital system notices any manual error like "jumping" of the red signal or any other malfunction. Once implemented, it will cost Rs 50 lakh per kilometre to operate compared to about Rs 2 crore worldwide, as reported by India Today. 

The indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system has been built to help the Railways achieve the goal of "zero accidents". 

Kavach, device signal is passed at danger (SPAD) when a train passes a stop-signal. Once the system is activated, all trains within a 5-km range will halt to protect trains on adjacent tracks.

Kavach was announced in the 2022 union Budget as a part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative. As per PTI reports, 2,000 km of rail network is planned to be brought under the indigenous world-class technology, ‘Kavach’, for safety and capacity augmentation in 2022-23.

(With agency inputs)