Hyderabad, March 4: Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday witnessed the functioning of ‘Kavach’, an indigenously designed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system in Hyderabad.
The union railway minister informed that Kavach is Safety Integrity Level (SIL-4) certified which is the highest level of safety certification.
Speaking to the media, Vaishnaw said, “Future plan is to roll it out very rapidly and export it to other countries also. This year we will roll it out on 2,000 Kms and in coming years 4,000-5,000 Kms every year.”
भारत में बना – भारत का कवच।#BharatKaKavach pic.twitter.com/gGQRfFKNCM
— Ashwini Vaishnaw (@AshwiniVaishnaw) March 4, 2022
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.
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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.
