₹1,364 crore for Kavach

Indian Railways has approved projects worth ₹1,364.45 crore to put more trains under the Kavach safety system and to replace older signalling gear on some of its busiest routes. The package combines collision-prevention equipment, optical fibre communication links, and station signalling upgrades rather than treating safety and capacity as separate problems. One part of the approval covers Kavach equipment for 232 locomotives in Southern Railway at a cost of about ₹208.81 crore. Another part expands the optical fibre cable network in Northern Railway, and another replaces panel interlocking with electronic interlocking at 49 stations in South Central Railway. Kavach is Indian Railways’ in-house automatic train protection system, and its basic job is to stop a train from doing something unsafe when a human driver misses a signal or approaches danger too fast. If two trains are on a collision course, or if a locomotive passes a stop signal, the system is designed to warn the driver and then apply brakes automatically if the warning is not acted on. That makes Kavach closer to a last-resort shield than a normal signalling light. Signals tell a driver what to do from the side of the track, while Kavach adds a second layer inside the train and between trains, using radio communication and trackside equipment to keep checking speed, movement authority, and location in real time. Indian Railways has been moving Kavach from pilot use toward network-scale deployment for several years, and the system’s newer standard matters here. The Research Designs and Standards Organisation approved Kavach specification version 4.0 on July 16, 2024, after earlier field experience on 1,465 route kilometres in South Central Railway helped refine the design. By March 2026, the Railway Ministry said Kavach 4.0 had already been commissioned on 1,452 route kilometres, including parts of the Delhi–Mumbai and Delhi–Howrah high-density corridors. The ministry also said trackside implementation had been taken up on 24,427 route kilometres covering the Golden Quadrilateral, the Golden Diagonal, high-density routes, and other identified sections. The signalling side of this week’s approval is just as important as the locomotive hardware. Panel interlocking is an older station control setup that depends on relay-based logic and more manual handling, while electronic interlocking shifts route-setting and conflict checks into computer-based systems that are faster to operate and easier to integrate with modern traffic management. Optical fibre cable sounds less dramatic than anti-collision software, but it is the network that lets modern signalling talk quickly and reliably across long distances. Railways said these communication works are critical for both signalling and Kavach deployment, because a protection system is only as good as the speed and reliability of the information moving through it. The immediate effect of the ₹1,364.45 crore package is safer train handling on specific locomotives and routes. The larger effect is that Indian Railways is trying to raise line capacity without depending only on new tracks, because better signalling and protection systems let trains run closer to schedule with fewer safety-related delays and fewer operating conflicts. This fits a much bigger spending pattern inside the railway system. A Press Information Bureau note released in early 2026 said Indian Railways’ expenditure on safety-related activities had risen from ₹39,200 crore in 2013–14 to ₹1,17,693 crore in 2025–26, with a further ₹1,20,389 crore budgeted for 2026–27. The headline number, then, is not just a one-off equipment purchase. It is a targeted round of approvals inside a broader push to wire more of India’s rail network with digital signalling, radio-based train protection, and station systems that can handle dense traffic with less room for human error.