Railways clears Rs 170 crore to finish Kavach 4.0 on 712 km of Moradabad division

The Ministry of Railways on 1 September approved Rs 170 crore to fit Kavach Version 4.0 on the remaining 712 route kilometres of Northern Railway's Moradabad Division. The work is meant to close the last unprotected stretches in a division that carries dense passenger and freight traffic between Delhi and the east.

Kavach is India's own automatic train protection system. It is certified to Safety Integrity Level 4, the top rung used for signalling. In practice it does four jobs: it stops a train that is about to pass a signal at danger, it applies brakes when a collision geometry appears, it enforces speed in restricted sections, and it cuts the chance that two trains occupy the same block because a driver missed a light. Those are the failures that have defined several Indian crashes in the past decade.

Ashwini Vaishnaw told the Lok Sabha in July that Version 4.0 was already commissioned on 2,633 route kilometres as of 31 July 2026. Of that, 1,423 kilometres sit on the Delhi-Mumbai corridor and 1,210 kilometres on Delhi-Howrah. Moradabad is the next large piece on the northern grid. The per-kilometre cost on this sanction is about Rs 24 lakh. That figure is useful because it lets other divisions estimate what a full fit-out will actually bill, rather than what a speech promises.

The same day the ministry cleared two other works that together bring the 1 September packet to either Rs 442 crore or Rs 675 crore, depending on whether a Samastipur signalling job is counted in the same release. South Eastern Railway received Rs 272 crore for an 11-kilometre bypass between the Adra end and Joychandipahar in West Bengal. The bypass is a congestion project, not a safety overlay. It takes crossing traffic off a jammed junction so that coal and passenger trains stop blocking each other. A modern signalling package for Samastipur Division in Bihar is the third line in some ministry notes.

Version 4.0 is the specification that matters. Earlier Kavach generations had limited vendor support and slower rollout. 4.0 is the one being laid on the two busiest long-distance corridors. Fitting Moradabad after those corridors is a logical sequence: protect the trunk, then the feeder that feeds the trunk. It is also an admission that 2,633 kilometres is still a small share of a network that runs more than 68,000 route kilometres.

The political pressure behind the sanction is not hidden. Collision inquiries in recent years have repeated the same recommendation: automatic protection on high-density routes, not only better rules for drivers. Kavach is the indigenous answer to Europe's ETCS and to similar Japanese and Chinese overlays. Importing those systems at national scale would have taken longer and cost foreign exchange. Building 4.0 at home trades speed of invention for speed of factories. The factories now have a 712-kilometre order.

Commissioning is not the same as the sanction. Cables, balises, locomotive equipment and crew training all have to follow the file. The July figure of 2,633 kilometres already commissioned is the benchmark. If Moradabad's 712 kilometres go live inside a year, the ministry can show a 3,300-kilometre protected core on the northern and western trunks. If they slip, the Rs 170 crore will sit in the accounts as an intention. Passengers will know the difference only when a train that should have stopped at a red signal does stop.