Odisha Train Tragedy: How Successive Railway Ministers Spun The Anti-Collision Device

We may not know whether anti-collision devices would have averted the train crash in Balasore, but successive railway ministers since 2000 have been claiming in their budget speeches that they would prevent collisions while chasing the goal—ever-receding it seems now—of installing them across the network and assuring members of parliament that “safety never sleeps”.  

Speaking to reporters at the accident site, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said if the anti-collision device—which she had introduced in 2000 as railway minister in the Vajpayee government—had been installed in the trains that had collided, the “incident would not have happened”. Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who was by her side, did not agree with the assertion and said a change in electronic interlocking was the cause. 

But, if electronic interlocking had played up and caused the Coromandel Express to enter the loop line and ram a stationery goods train, a device meant to prevent collisions should have done just that. 

That’s what the Indian Railways has been claiming over the past 20 years. MPs have been told on the floor of the house of “pilot project”, “comprehensive test”, “dedication to the nation” and universal coverage of the devices “upon successful completion of extended trials that have been commissioned”. 

After all that talk, the Modi government pressed the reset button. In March 2022, it said in a press release that Vaishnaw had inspected the trial of Kavach, an "indigenous automatic train protection system" to boost safety in train operations. It said the trial was successfully conducted between two railway stations in South Central Railway. The system would be installed on 2,000 route km in 2022-23. The release also said Kavach was one of the cheapest safety technologies, with a probability of error of one in 10,000 years.

Three vendors had been approved for supply of the devices and 1,455 route km in South Central Railway had been equipped with them at a cost of Rs 22 crore, the government said on March 29, in reply to a question in the Lok Sabha.

Is Kavach different from ACD that was named Raksha Kavach and dedicated to the nation on Oct. 15, 2001? And, if after successful completion of extended trials, that device was declared fit for installation on trains in six zonal railways, what was the need for the railways to develop a new device and conduct fresh trials? 

It is surprising that MPs did not hold the railways to account for their claims and the standing committees glossed over the spin.   

Going back to the beginning, in her budget speech of Feb. 25, 2000, Railway Minister Banerjee said she was “happy to announce” that Konkan Railway Corp. had developed an ACD. When installed in locomotives, brake vans, stations, level crossings and other vulnerable spots, she said, it would avert collision or reduce the impact. The Northeast Frontier Railway would test the device for installation across the railways upon successful trials, Banerjee said.

Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who succeeded Banerjee in the Railway Ministry, said in his budget speech on Feb. 26, 2002, that the ACD had been named Raksha Kavach. It was based on GPS and after validation in “extended trials”, it would be planted in the whole system. He was speaking in the shadow of a railway accident on the Kadalundi bridge in June 2001, when four bogies of the Mangalore-Chennai mail fell from the bridge killing 59 people and injuring more than 300 persons. 

The following year, Kumar said deployment of ACDs had started. They would be installed on 1,800 RKM and a survey on 1,641 RKM was in progress. To accelerate the work, a survey of 10,000 RKM would be conducted and ACDs installed on an additional 1,750 RKM. 

General elections were held in 2004. Kumar presented an interim budget on Jan. 30 that year. He said ACDs would be installed on 1,736 km of broad-gauge railway in the northeast and they would be placed on the entire broad gauge network progressively over the next five years. 

Lalu Prasad, Railway Minister in the Manmohan Singh government, declared on Feb. 26, 2005, that the first ACD section on Indian Railways was likely to be ready by March 2005 in the northeast. 

But the trials didn’t end. In his budget speech on Feb. 27, two years later, Prasad said “the testing of ACD on Northeast Frontier Railway”, as per the Indian Railways’ Corporate Safety Plan, “is in its last phase and is likely to be completed by March 2007”.

The following year, Prasad said the tests had yielded “encouraging results”. (Kumar had said five years earlier that deployment had begun.) It has been decided to install the ACDs in a phased manner over the entire railway network, he said. Over the next two years, they would be installed on Southern, South Central and Southwestern Railway zones. 

After returning to the railway ministry, this time in the Manmohan Singh government, Banerjee said in her 2009-10 budget speech that ACDs were operational on 1,736 RKM in the northeast. Work on placing them on 1,700 RKMs in three southern zones was “planned to be completed in two years”.

Banerjee’s 2011-12 budget speech mentions an “improved” version being tested successfully and the Railways deciding to deploy it in Eastern, East Central and South-eastern Railways. 

Dinesh Trivedi, who was in the Trinamool Congress (now BJP) and took over as Railway Minister two days after an accident at Fatehpur Malwa near Kanpur on July 10, 2011, vowed “to eliminate recurrence of such painful happenings” by “strengthening safety, safety, safety".

He said Indian railway safety standards would have to be benchmarked against those of Europe and Japan. He proposed a Railway Safety Authority as a statutory regulatory body and also commissioned a white paper on railway safety by a committee headed by space scientist Anil Kakodkar. The committee observed that the Indian Railways suffer from an “implementation bug” meaning they don’t stick to deadlines. 

Pawan Kumar Bansal, whose tenure saw a railway accident in Allahabad during the Kumbh Mela, also made reassuring statements on safety.  In his 2013-14 budget speech, he said the ACD, renamed the Train Collision Avoidance System, was proposed to be put to rigorous trials to validate the technology under complex operational conditions. (Previous railway ministers had said that the technology had been validated). 

Sadananda Gowda, the first Railway Minister in the Modi government, made no mention of ACDs in his budget speech. Suresh Prabhu, who followed, said the Railways had tied up with Korean and Japanese research institutes to upgrade safety standards and prepare a “zero accident” roadmap.

He said “state of the art” technology would be deployed even for “routine” examination of tracks. In the 2015-16, budget speech, Prabhu announced the train collision avoidance system would be installed on “select sections at the earliest”.  In 2016-17, Prabhu said “we intend to equip 100% of the high-density network in the next three years” with the train collision avoidance system to prevent head-on collisions. 

That was the last separate railway budget. The tradition was discontinued as railway minsters were using the occasion to improve their political prospects at the cost of the railways. Sadly, the railways are under even less public scrutiny now, while the grandstanding continues.