Journey of the automatic train protection system

The Balasore train disaster shocked the nation. It has raised uncomfortable questions about passenger safety as well as the priorities of the Indian Railways. In the past few years, the government, through a sustained blitzkrieg about bullet trains, Vande Bharat trains and ‘aircraft-like’ coaches, made people believe that the Railways was witnessing a ‘technological leap.’

An indigenous technology developed to prevent collisions and accidents was branded Kavach in this image-building exercise. A government press note claimed the Kavach to be “one of the cheapest Safety Integrity Level-4 certified technologies with the probability of error of 1 in 10,000 years.” It was projected as a potential revenue generator through exports. Such hyped-up marketing of Kavach made it appear as if train accidents in India were now a thing of the past. The horrendous accident has shattered all such notions about passenger safety and Kavach.

In reality, a foolproof accident- and collision-prevention system is a technological mirage that the Indian Railways has been chasing for 25 years. In 1998, Europe adopted a uniform and inter-operable automatic train protection system, the European Train Control System (ETCS), to replace the existing systems. Using the GSM wireless technology, it was designed to facilitate voice and data communication between the track and the train.

The Railways initiated a pilot project to test the ETCS on a small route under the Central Railway in 1999 for Rs 50 crore. But soon, it realised that the cost was too high and kept the project on hold. Meanwhile, Konkan Railway Corporation Limited (KRCL) developed a microprocessor-based Anti-Collision Device (ACD). The Indian Railways decided to try it out on the Jalandhar-Amritsar section.

Since 1999, the ACD later named Raksha Kavach has figured in Railway Budget speeches. In the Interim Railway Budget for 2004-05, Nitish Kumar announced a Technology Mission on Railway Safety, with the ACD as a key component. By this time, the ACD was installed on 1,736 km of the network on the Northeast Frontier Railway and surveys were underway on 10,000 km all over the country. Kumar projected that the ACD would be provided on all broad gauge tracks progressively over the next five years. As per the KRCL estimates, the cost was to be Rs 1,600 crore.

While the Railways was slowly adopting the ACD, serious technical and operational issues surfaced in the Northeast Frontier Railway where it was made operational by 2006. Unwarranted braking was reported and it hit the running of trains. It also needed several mid-section communication repeaters which were prone to theft and vandalism. The KRCL developed and deployed an improved version 1.1.2 of the ACD, but the problem of false alarms leading to braking persisted. For sections with multiple lines and electrified routes, the KRCL then came up with ACD 2.0 version. It was tested in some routes in the Chennai Division of Southern Railway during 2010 and 2011. More technical issues emerged, which the KRCL could not resolve, forcing the Railways to put on hold the expansion of the ACD.

In 2010, the then Railway Minister Mamata Banerjee announced that the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) was developing another device called the Train Protection Warning System (TPWS). It combined automatic train-protection and anti-collision features and was based on the ETCS standards. The DSO worked with three private companies Medha Servo Drives, Hyderabad Batteries Limited and Kernex Microsystems for the development and manufacture of components.

Since then, several pilot projects have been undertaken in different railway zones and the system now called Kavach is being installed. In the Budget 2022-23, it was announced that it would be rolled out on 2,000 km during the year. In 2023, it was announced that Kavach would be operational on the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah routes, totalling 3,000 km, by March 2024.

Developing a new technology indigenously and implementing it in a complex and operational legacy system like the Railways is a big challenge, as the journey of the automatic train protection system has demonstrated. In the 1980s, the Railways grappled with the computerisation of the passenger reservation system. The Railway Board initially opposed the idea and when the Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC) offered to develop it, the Railways insisted that passenger reservation was a core function of the Railways and it could not be entrusted to an outside agency, though the CMC was a PSU. A new agency, the Centre for Railway Information Systems, was floated to work with the CMC. Freight computerisation took 20 years, from planning to implementation.

In the present case, the first ACD came from an external entity, the KRCL, and the Indian Railways had rejected it 10 years later. For the next 10 years, the Railways worked with the technology developed by one of its agencies. Regarding standards, the Railways first rejected the European standards and then accepted them. The engineering expertise outside the Railways could have been utilised while taking such decisions.

The rollout of the accident-prevention system across the network needs industrial partners for supplying hardware and sub-systems for stations, locomotives and trackside. In the first 10 years, this aspect was overlooked. There was only one vendor. In 2011, the Railways started working with three companies and now plans to have more private partners. Technology adoption and assimilation in a large system also require training and retooling of manpower at different levels.

Finally, the introduction of a new technology-based solution for passenger safety needs a clear long-term vision, a blueprint for implementation and sustained funding. In 2012, a committee to review rail safety recommended several organisational changes, such as the creation of a railway safety authority. In 2014, a technology mission for the Railways was launched. But funding was suboptimal and erratic.

Given its encompassing nature, the accident protection system can’t be implemented in isolation. It should be a part of the overall plan to put the Railways on the track of a technological change.