Accident-prone railways rushes Kavach installation on 10,000 locos

Indian Railways is rolling out tenders for equipping 10,000 locomotives with Kavach 4.0, the latest version of the indigenous automatic train safety system.
The Railways will also finalize tenders for a Kavach rollout on 9,000 km of its network soon that would complete the exercise of installing automatic train protection (ATP) systems at stations as well as locos.
A spate of railway accidents in the past couple of months has reinforced the need for a faster rollout of a train protection system that would at least check human error and signal- crossing that often results in accidents.
Railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that Kavach 4.0, approved by the RDSO (Research Designs and Standards Organisation), the standards-setting organisation of Railways, will be rolled out across the rail network starting from October this year covering 10,000 locos in the first phase, which will take two years to complete.
Railways has about 15,000 locos and about 5,000 EMU, DMU etc, all of which will be equipped with Kavach. The minister said another tender for 10,000 locos may be issued once the first phase of the project is completed so that all locos are equipped with the system in the next four years, much before the network and stations are fitted with Kavach systems.
Since the approval of Kavach system in 2021, the version 3.2 is being installed on Railway networks and has so far covered 1,561 km of its network. Vaishnaw informed that, this process would be fast tracked as domestic production capacity for the system is set to rise in coming years with the addition of two more suppliers to the existing three, while three more would come up for its production in coming months.
“We expect to cover about 5,000-5,500 km of Railway network with Kavach from next year onwards with pace getting faster in coming years with expansion of its production base and installation capabilities,” the Rail minister said.
Indian railway has a network size of 70,000 km and government wants to cover entire network with Kavach in about a decade much faster than what other global Railways took to complete the system rollout.
Vaishnaw said that Kavach 4.0 has been tested for all climatic and geographical conditions across the length and breadth of the country including on mountainous terrain, desert areas, humid area, jungle etc and would become a universal system for the railways for next few years before Railways looks at putting in place an even advanced version 6.0 of the ATP with moving block technology that would even replace the need for having signalling stations along the railway network.
The system is already operational on some stretches of Delhi – Mumbai and Delhi- Kolkata route. It will now be rolled out on Kolkata-Chennai and Mumbai-Chennai routes on priority so that the golden quadrilateral of Railway network, also the busiest network, gets this safety feature first.
The need for Kavach and its quicker roll out is now being considered as Railways looks to boost its safety and security apparatus to bring down the incidence of accidents due to lapses on account of failure of Railway pilot to register signals. In the event of trains moving on main lines facing a collision, the Kavach system registers the obstructions ahead and stops the train, preventing derailment or accidents.
India started the process of having its own ATP in 2012 and it was between 2014 to 2016 when a lot of emphasis was given and Kavach was developed. Between 2016-19 the system got tested and in 2021, Railways issued the first large tender worth around ₹1,000 crore for covering 3,000 km of Railway network with Kavach system. So, around 1,465 km of IR network is covered with Kavach.
The system was earlier being made only by three players -Medha, Kernex and HBL Power Systems. Now MNCs such as Japanese Kyosan and , GGtronics have been finalised while other vendors such as Germany’s Siemens and French transportation giant Alstom may also get permission to make Kavach in India.
Kavach is an indigenously developed ATP system by RDSO in collaboration with Indian Industry and tested by South Central Railway to achieve the corporate objective of safety in train operations in Indian Railways. It is a state-of-the-art electronic system of highest security integrity level-4 standards and comes with Independent Safety Assessment (ISA) certification.
Kavach is meant to provide protection to trains to pass signals at danger (red) and to avoid collisions. If the driver fails to control the train in accordance with the speed restrictions, it automatically activates the train braking system. In addition, it prevents collisions between two engines equipped with a functional armor system.
An earlier plan of railways was to ensure safety of trains operations on busy routes. According to it, the first priority would be networks where speed of running trains is up to 160 kmph with automatic block signaling and centralized traffic control on High Density Routes and New Delhi-Mumbai and New Delhi-Howrah sections. The second priority would be have Kavach system on trains running on heavily used networks with automatic block signaling and centralized traffic control. And in the third phase, have Kavach on other passenger high density routes with automatic block signalling.
Kavach works best for heavy density routes where trains run at frequent intervals and gap between two trains is often lot less than other routes. Automatic block signalling will stop trains automatically if train operator fails to see a signal.
The Railways over the last 10 years has invested around ₹1.8 trillion in safety. This is almost two-and-half times the investment which went into safety during the 10-year period between 2004-14. 
Vaishnaw said that a record ₹1.08 trillion is being spent by the Railways on safety related activities in FY25.