Safety first: How well can Kavach protect you during your train travel?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

railway signal engineers, including him, were over the moon when an indigenously developed signalling equipment was successfully tested on a passenger train that chugged along the Telangana-Karnataka border. By then Mansukhani had spent over four years in a laboratory in Lucknow’s Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO), a railway arm, to figure out an alternative to the popular European Train Control System (ETCS).

The engineer, who had prior experience working with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) before joining the Railways in 1992 and who was on deputation to a project on the UK Railway signalling in the early 2000s, had been given a free rein for a cut-and-try testing.

A year later, in 2017, the project was in a shambles. The Railways decided to install Europe’s ETCS Level-1 in 10,000 km, a decision that meant a death knell for Mansukhani’s pet project.

The engineer, who had been burning the midnight oil in RDSO’s lab to develop an automatic, indigenous train protection system since 2012, was transferred to a routine railway administrative job in Madurai.

But as luck would have it, Railway Board honchos realised that ETCS Level 1 was becoming obsolete. And Rail Tel’s invitation of bids for ETCS Level-2 in 2020 resulted in bidders quoting exorbitant prices.

This forced the Railways to scrap the idea of purchasing European hardware. The national transporter quickly resuscitated the Indian version and gave it a new name— Kavach, meaning armour.