Ashwini Vaishnav, Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting.
Kavach will be installed throughout the country’s railway network within 6 years. The shielding system is being installed very quickly and at the lowest cost compared to other countries. Indian Railways will soon achieve the new record of zero train accidents and zero train derailments. Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav said this on Tuesday. He said it takes only 22 hours to install Kavach-4 on an Indian Railways locomotive. Before this work was done for many days. Currently, Railways is working on installing Kavach-4 in 68 locomotive maintenance workshops in the country. The Kavach system is installed every day on 200 locomotives throughout the country.
He said that the work of installing Kavach-4 on the locomotives and locomotive tracks is progressing rapidly. Kavach-4 installation work is carried out in 68 locomotive maintenance workshops in the country. Previously, installing armor on a locomotive took about 15 days, but this has now been reduced to six days. Now Kavach-4 is installed on a locomotive in just 22 hours.
Railways has 18 thousand electrified locomotives
The Railway Minister said that all workshops in the country have the capacity to install armor on around 10 to 12 locomotives per day. It depends on the operation of the railway how many locomotives can be armored in a day and in which workshop. Recently the Ministry of Railways had issued an order.
He said that after strengthening the field work and technical facilities, any electrified locomotive that comes to the locomotive workshop for maintenance for more than 24 hours, Kavach-4 should also be installed on that locomotive engine. According to the Ministry of Railways of India, Railways has a total of 18,000 electrified locomotives.
Objective to install armor in 10 thousand locomotives
A target has been set to install shielding on these engines in 10,000 locomotives in two years. While in the next four years Kavach 4 will be installed on all electrified locomotives and electrified railway tracks across the country. Indian Railways has first trained nine thousand railway employees to install the shielding on a large scale.
Currently, a tender has been put out to install armoring on a total of 15 thousand kilometers of railway tracks. So far, shielding has been installed on 1,000 kilometers of railway tracks, including the Mumbai to Baroda and Delhi to Palwal routes.