By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-03-17
Two per cent safe: Kavach works, but Indian Railways cannot afford the wait
By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar
In January 2026, Indian Railways set a record. Engineers commissioned 472 kilometres of Kavach 4.0 -- the indigenous Automatic Train Protection system -- in a single month, spanning critical sections across Western, Northern, and East Central Railways. By March, total deployment had reached 1,452 route kilometres, covering portions of the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah corridors, two of the busiest rail arteries in the world.
The achievement is genuine. Kavach 4.0 carries SIL-4 safety certification -- the highest international standard for safety-critical systems. It automatically applies brakes when a driver fails to respond to speed limits, prevents collisions at controlled crossings, and operates reliably in poor visibility. More than 55,000 personnel have been trained on the system, including 47,500 loco pilots and assistant loco pilots.
And here is the number that puts the achievement in context: Indian Railways operates approximately 68,000 route kilometres of track. Kavach protects 1,452 of them. That is 2.1 per cent.
The remaining 97.9 per cent of the network runs without automatic train protection.
The cost advantage that should accelerate deployment
Kavach's most remarkable feature is not its technology but its price. Trackside infrastructure costs approximately Rs 50 lakh per route kilometre, with locomotive equipment at roughly Rs 80 lakh per unit. This is substantially cheaper than the European Train Control System, which exceeds Rs 2 crore per kilometre for comparable functionality. Denmark's national ETCS conversion project alone carries a price tag of €3.3 billion.
India has built a system that delivers ETCS Level 2 equivalent protection at roughly one-quarter the cost. This is not a minor engineering achievement. It is the kind of cost disruption that should, in theory, enable rapid nationwide rollout -- the same logic that made Aadhaar and UPI possible when comparable systems in other countries cost ten times more per user.
The budget allocation reflects the ambition. The Railway Board has earmarked Rs 1.08 lakh crore for Kavach deployment. Rs 2,763.9 crore has been spent through February 2026. Safety spending on Indian Railways has tripled over the past decade, from Rs 39,463 crore in 2013-14 to Rs 1,16,470 crore projected for 2025-26.
The money is there. The technology works. The cost is manageable. The question is speed.
The trains are not waiting
On November 4, 2025, a passenger train collided with a goods train near Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh. Eleven people died and at least twenty were injured. The section did not have Kavach.
In January 2025, twelve passengers of the Pushpak Express were killed near Jalgaon after a false fire alarm caused them to disembark onto an adjacent track, where they were struck by an incoming train. In February 2025, a stampede at New Delhi railway station killed twenty people in a rush to board a train for Prayagraj.
These are not freak events. Indian Railways recorded over 40 consequential accidents per year on average since 2018-19. More than 748 people died in 638 train crashes over the previous decade. Twelve million passengers travel on 14,000 trains daily across 64,000 kilometres of track. The system is vast, heavily used, and -- on 97.9 per cent of its length -- unprotected by automatic collision prevention.
Kavach would not have prevented every one of these incidents. The Jalgaon tragedy involved a false alarm and human panic, not a signalling failure. The Delhi stampede was a crowd management disaster. But the Chhattisgarh collision -- a passenger train running into a goods train -- is precisely the category of accident that Kavach is designed to eliminate. On a Kavach-equipped section, the system would have detected the conflict and applied emergency braking automatically.
The technology existed. It was deployed 400 kilometres away. It was not deployed where it was needed.
The pace problem
At the current deployment rate, the arithmetic is discouraging. Indian Railways commissioned roughly 1,000 route kilometres of Kavach in the twelve months from March 2025 to March 2026, with the January 2026 burst representing a significant acceleration. If that pace were sustained -- and there is no guarantee it will be -- covering the full 68,000-kilometre network would take approximately 68 years.
Even covering the high-density network -- roughly 35,000 route kilometres that carry the overwhelming majority of traffic and face the highest collision risk -- would take over 30 years at current rates.
Kavach has also missed previous deployment deadlines, a pattern that is familiar across Indian infrastructure projects. The gap between announcement and commissioning has been longer than originally projected at multiple stages. Version upgrades (Kavach is already at 4.0, with 5.0 in development) add capability but also reset installation timelines as existing hardware requires updating.
None of this diminishes the technology. It underscores the difference between building a system and deploying it at scale across the world's fourth-largest railway network.
The export temptation
There is a secondary question that deserves scrutiny. Kavach's cost advantage has generated interest from other countries -- its price point makes it attractive for developing nations that cannot afford European ETCS. The export potential is real and strategically valuable, particularly as India seeks to position itself as a defence and infrastructure technology exporter.
But there is a tension between exporting a safety system and deploying it domestically. Every engineering team assigned to an export project is a team not installing Kavach on an Indian corridor. Every diplomatic win from selling the technology abroad rings hollow if Indian passengers continue dying on unprotected tracks at home.
This is not an argument against exports. It is an argument for sequencing. The BrahMos missile is exported to multiple countries, but India's own military is fully equipped first. Kavach should follow the same logic: domestic saturation of high-risk corridors before aggressive export marketing.
What acceleration would require
The constraint on Kavach deployment is not money, not technology, and not political will. It is execution capacity -- the number of trained installation teams, the availability of specialised signalling equipment, and the coordination required to install safety systems on active railway lines without disrupting the 14,000 trains that run daily.
Scaling this capacity requires the same approach that India has applied successfully in other domains. UPI reached a billion transactions per month by opening the platform to private sector participants. The National Highways programme accelerated from 12 kilometres per day to 28 kilometres per day by involving multiple contractors simultaneously. Kavach deployment could follow a similar model -- licensing the technology to multiple vendors, running parallel installation programmes across zones, and setting quarterly deployment targets with public accountability.
The Railway Board has indicated that deployment will accelerate significantly from 2026-27 onward. The budget allocation supports this. But acceleration needs to be measured in thousands of kilometres per year, not hundreds, if the coverage gap is to close within a generation rather than a lifetime.
The two per cent question
Kavach is one of the more impressive indigenous technology programmes India has produced. It does what its designers intended, at a cost that most of the world cannot match, with a safety certification that meets the highest international standards. The engineers and the organisation behind it deserve recognition for building something genuinely world-class.
But technology that protects 2 per cent of the network is a prototype, not a safety system. It becomes a safety system when it protects the corridors where people are dying -- not just the showcase routes between Delhi and Mumbai.
Indian Railways carries more passengers daily than most countries carry in a year. The scale of the system is its pride. It should not also be the excuse for the pace of its protection.
The trains run every day. On 97.9 per cent of the track, they run without Kavach. Every month of delay is measured not in kilometres but in the accidents that occur on sections where the technology exists but has not yet arrived.
Two per cent is a start. It is not a shield.
Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar is the Chief Executive Officer of the Aarksee Group of Companies, based in Saudi Arabia.
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