South Central Railway (SCR), which pioneered the rollout of Kavach, the indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system, across 1,465 km of track through extensive field trials, is now set to upgrade to the latest Kavach 4.0 version, according to senior railway officials.

Tenders have been floated to upgrade Kavach 3.2 to 4.0 on key routes, including the 960-km Ankai-Nanded-Dharmabad-Nizamabad-Secunderabad-Kurnool City-Dhone-Guntakal section, the 331-km Parbhani-Parli Vaijnath-Latur Road-Bidar-Vikarabad section, and the 174-km Wadi-Vikarabad-Sanatnagar section.

Officials said SCR and the newly-formed South Coast Railway (ScoR) will also implement Kavach 4.0 on High Density Network (HDN) routes spanning 1,618 km. These include the Balharshah-Kazipet-Vijayawada, Vijayawada-Gudur, Vijayawada-Duvvada and Wadi-Guntakal-Yerraguntla-Renigunta corridors.

Field trials involving the design, installation and testing of Kavach have been completed on 487 km across the Kazipet-Peddampet, Malkajgiri-Kamareddi, Cherlapalli-Raghunathpalli, Guntakal-Raichur and Mudkhed-Parbhani sections. Within SCR, the latest version has already been commissioned on the 63-km Sanathnagar-Vikarabad section. Additionally, 211 locomotives have been equipped with Kavach, along with 16 level-crossing gates and two block signals.

Officials said Kavach 4.0 offers improved location accuracy, enhanced signal aspect information in large railway yards, station-to-station interfacing and direct integration with existing electronic interlocking systems. Key features include the installation of Kavach at stations and block sections, RFID tags along tracks, telecom towers, Optic Fibre Cable (OFC) networks and Loco Kavach units on locomotives.

The advanced version has already been commissioned over 2,569 km on the high-density Delhi-Mumbai (1,423 km) and Delhi-Howrah (1,146 km) corridors. Providing an update in a written reply to the Lok Sabha, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that trackside Kavach implementation is underway on 21,858 km of HDN routes across the country, including the Golden Quadrilateral and Golden Diagonal networks.

Nationwide Kavach 4.0 has been installed in 6,153 locomotives, while work is progressing on additional locomotives and 1,200 MEMU trains with dual driving cabins. Trackside infrastructure has been deployed over 7,726 km, covering 988 stations, 1,668 telecom towers and 11,253 km of optic fibre cable.

More than 94,000 railway technicians, operators and engineers, including over 57,000 loco pilots and assistant loco pilots, have been trained in Kavach through programmes developed in collaboration with the Secunderabad-based Indian Railways Institute of Signal Engineering and Telecommunications (IRISET), he said.

Railway Ministry has allocated ₹2,066 crore for Kavach during the current financial year, while expenditure on Kavach-related works up to June 2026 has reached ₹3,874 crore. Kavach’s key safety features include prevention of Signal Passed at Danger (SPAD) incidents, automatic braking to prevent overspeeding, collision avoidance between equipped locomotives, auto-whistling at level crossings, emergency SOS messaging and centralised real-time monitoring of train movements, he added.

Published - July 29, 2026 09:18 pm IST