Rail ops: safety and upgrades

Indian Railways says Kavach 4.0 is now live on 1,452 route kilometres of the Delhi–Mumbai and Delhi–Howrah corridors, its busiest long-distance routes. (pib.gov.in) Kavach is an automatic train protection system: it monitors speed, reads trackside information, and applies brakes if a loco pilot does not slow or stop in time. The Railways Ministry said the version now in use can also help trains run more safely in poor weather. (pib.gov.in) The ministry said the rollout on these corridors includes 8,570 km of optical fibre cable, 1,100 telecom towers, 6,776 route-km of trackside equipment and 767 station data centers. Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw gave the update in a March 11, 2026 press release. (pib.gov.in) The pace has accelerated in recent months. The same ministry said Kavach 4.0 had been commissioned on 738 route km on December 5, 2025, and on 1,297 route km on February 13, 2026, before reaching 1,452 route km on March 11, 2026. (pib.gov.in 1) (pib.gov.in 2) (pib.gov.in 3) Those two corridors matter because they sit on India’s high-density network, where delays and errors ripple across passenger and freight traffic. The ministry said trackside Kavach work has now been taken up on 24,427 route km covering the Golden Quadrilateral, Golden Diagonal, high-density network and other identified sections. (pib.gov.in) Kavach has been in development for years. Passenger-train field trials began in February 2016, three firms were approved in 2018-19 to supply version 3.2, and Indian Railways adopted Kavach as its national automatic train protection system in July 2020. (pib.gov.in) Version 4.0 is the upgrade now being deployed at scale. The ministry said the Research Designs and Standards Organisation approved the 4.0 specification on July 16, 2024, with changes including better location accuracy, improved signal information in larger yards, fibre-based station-to-station links and direct connection to existing electronic interlocking systems. (pib.gov.in) (rdso.indianrailways.gov.in) The wider safety push is also getting more money. The ministry said spending on safety-related activities rose from ₹39,200 crore in 2013-14 to ₹1,20,389 crore in the 2026-27 budget estimate. (pib.gov.in) For now, the headline is not nationwide completion but concentration on the routes where the most trains run. Indian Railways has moved Kavach from trial sections to more than 1,450 route km of its core trunk lines, and the next phase is already mapped onto a much larger network. (pib.gov.in)