PREVENTING TRAIN COLLISIONS

INDIAN RAILWAYS' ANTI-COLLISION SYSTEM, KAVACH, HOLDS GREAT PROMISE FOR REDUCING TRAIN ACCIDENTS. BUT ITS SLOW ROLLOUT REMAINS AN ISSUE

-  Avishek G. Dastidar

IT was sometime in March last year, when two trains, travelling at 100 kilometres per hour, were racing towards each other from opposite sides, somewhere between Hyderabad and Lingampalli in Telangana. Just when you thought a head-on collision was inevitable, the two locomotives screeched to a halt, barely a hundred metres away from each other, as if guided by an invisible force. “Kavach,” the Union railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who was travelling in one of the trains, had declared, “is successful.” He was referring to India’s very own automatic train protection (ATP) system.

Before you could heave a sigh of relief and consign rail collisions to history, India saw at least two major train accidents this year, which together saw over 300 people being killed. On the evening of October 29, loco pilot S.M.S. Rao and his assistant S. Chiranjeevi on the Visakhapatnam-Rayagada train were caught in almost the same situation as Vaishnaw witnessed, except that this was no drill, and there was no Kavach. Jumping two successive signals, Rao and Chiranjeevi, quite inexplicably, drove their train, travelling at 60 kmph, straight into another stationary passenger train. Both died on impact, as did 12 passengers. A preliminary probe blamed the deceased engine drivers and said the signals on the route had been faulty, leading to a mix-up.