About KAVACH (UPSC)

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Context

It has been decided to implement ‘Kavach’ in a phased manner. So far, ‘Kavach’ has been deployed for 1,455 Route Kms on South Central Railway with 77 nos. of locomotives.
Currently, ‘Kavach’ work is in progress on Delhi-Mumbai & Delhi –Howrah corridors (3000 route kms).

About KAVACH

KAVACH is a state-of-the-art electronic system that was designed to help the Indian Railways achieve Zero Accidents.
It is an Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system that has been indigenously developed by the Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO) in collaboration with Indian industry with trials facilitated by South Central Railway to achieve the corporate objective of safety in train operations across Indian Railways.
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.
It is a Safety Integrity Level 4 (SIL-4) certified technology with the probability of an error being one in 10,000 years.

Significance

Once implemented, KAVACH will be the world's cheapest automatic train collision protection system, costing 50 lakh rupees per kilometre to operate compared to about two crore rupees worldwide. It also opens avenues of export of this indigenous technology for Railways.