RAILWAY SAFETY FUND PROPOSAL SENT TO FINANCE MINISTRY

chairmanship of Anil Kakodkar, f ormer Chairman, Atomic Energy Commission, was constituted in 2011 to look into all technical and technology related aspects for the safe running of trains. The committee submitted its report in February 2012. The report has 106 recommendations, to implement which would cost Rs 1 lakh crore.

According to a Ministry official, the HLSRC made 106 recommendations covering various aspects of Indian Railways. “Out of the 106 recommendations, 68 have been fully accepted, of which 27 have been fully implemented. While 19 recommendations have been partially accepted for implementation, 19 were found unacceptable,” he said.

“Moreover, we are working on other measures such as Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) on high density network and elimination of unmanned level crossings in a phased manner,” the official said. TCAS is a radio communication based sys- tem, with continuous update of movement authority. This system is aimed at providing the ability of preventing train accidents caused due to signal bypassing or non observance of speed restrictions by train drivers. The signal aspect is also displayed on the DMI (Driver Machine Interface) screen inside the locomotives in the train’s system. After successfully concept trials, the RDSO (Research Design and Standards Organisation) has taken up extended field trials of TCAS on a pilot section—the Lingamapalli- Vikarabad-Wadi-Bidar section of South Central Railway.

The Train Protection and Warning System (TPWS) is a proven automatic train protection system to avoid train accidents due to human error of signal bypassing or over-speeding. As a pilot project, TPWS has been provided at the ChennaiGummidipundi suburban section of Southern Railway, Hazrat Nizamuddin-Agra section of Northern/North Central Railway and Dum Dum-Kavi Subhash section of Kolkata Metro.