The Railway Minister boarded a train to review the technology
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday reviewed an anti-collision system developed by the Indian Railways today. Known as "Kavach", meaning armour, the Railways is promoting it as the world's cheapest automatic train collision protection system.
Mr Vaishnaw boarded a train to get first-hand experience of how the system works. The trial took place in the Sanathnagar-Shankarpalli section.
The Indian Railways aims to achieve the goal of "zero accidents" by deploying the anti-collision system.
After the trial, there's a plan to cover 2,000 km of the rail network under Kavach.
The system is designed in such a way that it will bring a train to a halt automatically if it notices another train on the same track within a prescribed distance.
Railway officials say a train will also stop on its own if the system finds a manual error or any other malfunction - like inadvertently jumping the red signal.
This technology is SIL4 (Safety Integrity Level - 4) certified, the highest certification level, meaning there's a possibility of only one error in 10,000 years.
The deployment of the Made-in-India technology was announced by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman during her Budget presentation this year as part of the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative.
Also, the lower cost of operating this system will help Indian vendors to compete in global markets.
Developed by Railway Ministry's Research Design and Standards Organisation, in collaboration with other partners, Kavach has been in the works for some time. The first conceptual field trials took place way back in October 2012 and the first field trials on passenger trains began in February 2016.
Following ore trails, Kavach was approved for speeds up to 160 kmph. Kavach is also known as Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) and Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system.
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