- विज्ञापन -
New Delhi: Accidents are to Indian Railways (IR) what bad loans are to a bank. They cannot be wished away. Having said that, has Indian Railways’ safety record improved? The answer is yes.
Numbers over the last 25 years show that trend. Number of accidents which used to be four digits until the early 1980s (1130 in 1982) are now in two digits in the last seven years (72 in FY18, 59 in FY19, 54 in FY20, 21 in FY21, 34 in FY 22, 48 in FY23 and 20 for the period April – September 2023).
Accidents happen primarily due to asset failure and human failure. [Asset failure cause accidents when locomotives, wagons and coaches, signals, points on railway tracks fail due to wear and tear]. Both these aspects have been improved drastically over the last decade. So what has IR done to ensure that accidents are minimized. As a first step towards this, IR started investment in safety.
Investment in Safety
IR has in the last decade increased its expenditure on maintenance significantly. The Rashtriya Rail Sanraksha Kosh (RRSK) was introduced in FY18 for replacement/renewal/upgradation of critical safety assets, with a corpus of 1 lakh crore for five years. From FY18 until FY22, a gross expenditure of Rs. 1.08 lakh crore was incurred on RRSK works.
Track Renewals
During this period, complete track renewal 21342 route kilometres has been done averaging over 4000 km of renewal each year. Strengthening, rehabilitation and rebuilding of bridges are being done to enhance safety. In FY22, 1541 bridges were strengthened.
LHB coaches
IR decided to use Linke-Hofmann-Busch (LHB) coaches for its broad gauge network. This has features such as anti climbing arrangement, less corrosive shell and better riding quality.
IR now produces only LHB coaches from April 2018 onwards having turned out 21320 coaches since then until FY22 (4,429 LHB coaches in FY19, 6,277 in FY20 and 4,323 in FY21 and 6291 in FY22) .
KAVACH
To reduce incidents of signal overshooting also called SPAD ( signal passing at danger), Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO), IR’s research arm along with three Indian firms has developed India’s own automatic train protection system (ATP) named KAVACH. It has been provided on 1445 route km of IR on South Central Railway with work in progress on New Delhi -Mumbai and New Delhi -Howrah routes. IR plans to roll out KAVACH on high density routes and highly utilised routes over IR.
97 per cent of broad gauge stations (6236) as on FY22 have colour light signalling with interlocking replacing the old mechanical signalling system enhancing safety in train running. Along with this, loco pilots are being trained on simulators to minimise incidents of SPAD.
Other measures
CCTV cameras for surveillance have been installed at 861 stations as of May 2022 and counting with plans to install video surveillance system in 6124 stations on the anvil. Safety audits, mock drills, provision of fire extinguishers inside all coaches are being done for safe train operations.
In sum, safety for IR is a work in progress and the attention to detail when it comes to safe running of trains is clearly visible.
