Soon after news of the horrific train accident in Odisha came out on the evening of June 2, people began asking questions about the Kavach system introduced by the Union government, which was supposed to make rail travel safe. Politicians in opposition parties have called out the Union government for its huge delay in implementing Kavach – an automatic train protection system – after more than 10 years of its inception. Kavach should have prevented or mitigated the impact of the accident whose death toll had reached 270 by Saturday noon, the opposition alleged. Kavach has been deployed only on 1,455 km of railway tracks in the country and it has not been available on the route where the accident took place.
Had the track and train been equipped with Kavach, the probability of a collision between two trains would have decreased drastically, if not averted altogether. The anti-collision system would have reduced the speed on the train and prevented a collision, if both the trains were fitted with the technology. Further, the train would not have entered the loop line as another train (goods train) was already there and it would have alerted the loco pilot. A loop line is a railway branch line which leaves the main line and rejoins it after a short distance. In this case, reports suggest that the Coromandel Express entered the loop line and then collided with the goods train.
But there is a catch. Former general manager of Integral Coach Factory Sudhanshu Mani says that Kavach would have been effective in averting a disaster if the loco pilot had overshot the signal. Then it would have kicked on, controlled the speed and brought the train to a stop. “But if a train derailed and its bogies would have fallen on another track, then Kavach would have been of scant help,” he says. This is because the track will mostly have short circuited due to the impact of the train on it and destroyed its communications and would fail to warn an approaching train.
The Kavach system depends on electronic and radio frequency devices installed on the trains, tracks and railway signalling systems. Obstructions on a track can be tracked by Kavach, only if it has not damaged the track in any way. In such cases, a visual identification by the loco pilot would help in averting a collision. In this case, it is still unclear whether the Coromandel Express crashed into a goods train that was on the same track or it derailed.
The name Kavach was given by the Modi government in 2020 to the existing Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) introduced by the Railway Ministry under Mamata Banerjee in 2011-12. However, in all these years little progress has been made in implementing the system, critics point out. In July 2020, while adopting Kavach as the National Automatic Train Protection System, it was decided that the system would cover more than 35,000 km of railway route.
Answering questions about Kavach in Parliament sessions, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on March 29, 2023, that Kavach has been deployed only on 1,455 km of the rail route, out of which 576 km is in the state of Maharashtra. However, no progress seems to have been made between August 2022 and March 2023.
From March to August 2022, less than 400 km were brought under Kavach. On March 23, 2022, the Minister told the Parliament that 1,098 km were completed on the South Central Railway.
At the time, the Minister said that trials of Kavach were conducted on the "Absolute Block section of Lingamapalli – Vikarabad - Wadi, Vikarabad - Bidar (250 km) section of South Central Railway." After the successful trials, three vendors – Medha Servo Drives Pvt Ltd, HBL Power Systems Ltd and Kernex Microsystems – were approved for the development of Kavach. The development work has been carried out by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO).
There were successful trials of Kavach in the Bidar - Parli Vaijnath - Parbhani and Manmad - Parbhani - Nanded - Secunderabad - Gadwal - Dhone - Guntakal section of the South Central Railway. Work was also being taken up for deploying Kavach on approximately 3,000 km on Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah corridors, for which tenders were invited. According to Minister Ashwini’s statement in March this year, the work on these routes should be over by March 2024.
“The delay is because they have to scale up production of the Kavach technology and for that, they need investments, which would take time. The 100% implementation [of Kavach] will take more than a couple of years from now,” a senior rail official told TNM.
In the global business summit of 2023, Vaishnaw spoke about Kavach as a very advanced system, better than the European Train Control System (ETCS) used across the world. "We decided to design and develop our system here which has to be simple, replicated and can be taken to the world. If you compare it with the European system, we are better than Level 2 of ECTS," he claimed at the time.
According to another source, Kavach should have stopped Bengaluru-Howrah Express with its braking system. “Given the approximate speed of 120km/h of the train, Kavach needs one kilometre prior reaction time,” a railway official said. When asked why the implementation of the scheme has been slow, the official said that production of the Kavach technology has to be scaled. “This needs investment. It will take a few years to implement it across all tracks,” the official said.
The Kavach system was included in the Union Budget of 2022, as part of its Atmanirbhar initiative. Kavach – a name given to the TCAS by the present government – means armour, in reference to the safety the system is supposed to provide the rails. In a release sent out by the Ministry of Railways in March 2022, Kavach is defined as a state-of-the-art electronic system designed to help the Indian Railways reduce accidents to zero.
"It activates the train braking system automatically if the driver fails to control the train as per the speed restrictions. In addition, it prevents collision between two locomotives equipped with a functional KAVACH system," the release said.
Kavach is supposed to use Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL-4) technology with a probability of error of one in 10,000 years. During a trial run in which two locomotives were made to collide to test the system, Kavach initiated the automatic braking system and halted the locomotives 380 metres apart from each other. It also automatically reduced the speed when the locomotive entered a loop line.
Another release by the Ministry in December 2022 included other benefits of Kavach as repeating in-cab signalling, which is useful for higher speeds and foggy weather, and auto whistling at level crossing gates.
It contains electronics and Radio Frequency Identification devices which should be installed in the locomotives, the signalling system and the railway tracks. The automatic braking happens when the devices connect through high radio frequencies.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee (who was Railway Minister at the time of TCAS introduction) decried the lack of anti-collision devices on the rails. “There was no anti-collision device on the rails, as far as I know. Had the device been there, this would not have happened,” she said.
Trinamool Congress spokesperson Saket Gokhale asked why Kavach had been deployed only on a minuscule percentage of total railway tracks in India.
“While anti-collision systems don't exist on 98% of Indian Railways routes, the Modi Govt is shockingly focused on starting more Vande Bharat high-speed trains, most of which are personally inaugurated by PM Modi. New high-speed trains being deployed on a railway network where 98% of it is without anti-collision technology. What could go wrong? The shocking train crash in Balasore, Odisha, last night could have been prevented by a functioning anti-collision system,” Saket tweeted.
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