Union Minister for Railways Ashwini Vaishnaw told Lok Sabha on Wednesday that railway accidents had come down by 77 per cent in 10 years — from 135 in 2014-15 to 31 in 2024-25 — as the Narendra Modi-led government was prioritising safety measures. He added that there was a constant effort to use new technologies to ensure the safety of trains.
Vaishnaw said that Kavach, a technology-intensive automatic train protection system, was commissioned under the Make-in-India initiative within a short period, while many developed countries took a few decades to move towards automatic train protection systems despite having a smaller railway network than India.
He said that the Kavach version 4.0 would be commissioned fully in a day on the Kota-Mathura track. He added that as Kavach technology required an extensive optical fibre network, a 5,856 km-long optical fibre network had been laid, 619 telecom towers installed, 708 stations equipped with data centres, and 1,107 locomotives installed with a software system.
Kavach is operational on 4,000 kilometers of railway track, he said.
Vaishnaw was replying to a question posed by Bhumare Sandipanrao Asaram, Shiv Sena MP from Aurangabad in Maharashtra, during the Question Hour.
Vaishnaw had faced the heat last year after a stampede at the New Delhi Railway Station claimed 18 lives during the Mahakumbh, leading to demands for his resignation from the Opposition.
While the Opposition flagged multiple train mishaps during his tenure, the deadliest train accident under Vaishnaw’s leadership was the 2023 Odisha train collision on June 2 near Bahanaga Bazar station, which claimed the lives of 296 people and injured over 1,200 when the Coromandel Express collided with a stationary freight train, and then hit another train.
