by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate finance, Markets, Technology
By Arun Kumar Das,
New Delhi : Aiming to enhance safety in train operations, Indian Railways will introduce a Mobile Train Radio Communication (MTRC) system on high-density routes at an estimated cost of Rs 9,000 crore ($1.5 billion).
MTRC will enable the locomotive pilots to talk to guards, control room supervisors and station masters from a running train.
The driver can alert the control room and station master about any unsafe condition such as crack, big stone or flooding of the track so that necessary steps can be taken to prevent any untoward incident, a senior Railway Ministry official said.
Currently, the driver communicates through a walkie talkie with the guard on a running train. He can alert the station master only after reaching the station and the station master in turn will relay the message to the control room for necessary action. As a result, precious time is lost before any corrective measures are taken.
The MTRC system will facilitate the train driver to pass on message from a running train to any concerned authorities about the route ahead and obstacles, if any.
The MTRC system, also known as Global System for Mobile Communications – Railway (GSM-R), provides a secured means of communication between train crew and control/maintenance staff and for carrying signalling information.
The railways is currently opertaionalising the MTRC on a 2,541 km-long route as a pilot project. It will be extended to about 20,000 km route covering all of the high-density rail network.
The official said the MTRC is required for enhancing safety and also speeding up the train as the driver does not depend upon the track-side signals.
A part of the railways’ ongoing modernisation of signalling and telecom system plan, the MTRC system is operational in Europe. Empowering the driver to make emergency calls, MTRC entails construction of towers with antenna along the route to ensure secured communication between drivers and concerned staff during an emergency.
The MTRC system is considered a must in semi-high-speed and high-speed train networks.
(Arun Kumar Das is a senior Delhi-based freelance journalist. He can be contacted at akdas20005@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
By Anand Singh,
New Delhi : It was a challenging year for Indian Railways as it had to deal with a spate of accidents amid efforts to improve speed, revenue, safety and efficiency.
The year saw a change of guard at the ministry — the third of the Modi government and the 11th in the past eight years — with Piyush Goyal replacing Suresh Prabhu in September after 20 people died due to the derailment of Puri-Haridwar Utkal Express.
The new railway minister spelt out his priorities in terms of passenger safety, non-fare options to increase revenue, fast-tracking investments and electrification of routes.
There was also a change at the top in the Railway Board and Ashwani Lohani took over as its Chairman in August.
Days after taking over, Lohani wrote a letter to the employees urging them to pitch in wholeheartedly to set right the “image perception” of the national transporter that it was facing at a critical juncture.
Lohani said Railways had suffered a “serious dent” in the recent past due to unfortunate incidents and mentioned the need to bring down its operating ratio by steps such as reducing expenditure and increasing freight loading.
Railways is the largest rail network in Asia and the world’s second-largest under one management and carries 23 million passengers daily. It is also the world’s largest employer under single management and has an estimated 130,000 employees.
The year also saw the rail budget being merged with the general budget, breaking a tradition that had been continuing since 1924.
The foundation stone was laid for the country’s first bullet train network on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad route being built in collaboration with Japan that will cover the distance in just over two hours and is expected to have spin-offs, including new technology and skills.
The Railways have evolved a road map to increase speed of trains on some stipulated sectors that connect the metro cities as well as some state capitals.
It has also set a target to eliminate all unmanned level crossings by next year.
The challenges that Railways face include modernising the rolling stock such as locomotives and coaches, and reducing load of its sections running at above-line capacity (40 percent of Indian Railways’ 1,219 line sections are utilised beyond 100 percent).
Goyal has laid emphasis on mopping up internal resources and said that the national transporter was not looking at more funds in the 2018-19 budget as it is focused on monetising its own assets.
The Union Budget for 2017-18 pegged the Indian Railways’ capital expenditure at Rs 1.31 lakh crore, the highest ever in its history. Of this, gross budgetary support from the Finance Ministry was to the tune of Rs 55,000 crore.
According to an analysis done by IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative, India’s death toll from train derailments in 2016-17 was the highest in a decade.
However, Railways’ own data says that “consequential train accidents” decreased from 107 to 104 in 2016-17 compared to the previous fiscal. It says that the number came down from 85 to 49 between April 1, 2017, and November 30, 2017, in comparison to the corresponding period last year.
The government had declared in 2015 that it will invest Rs 8.5 lakh crore in Indian railways to change the face of the sector. Goyal said earlier this year that railways is looking to invest about Rs 9.7 lakh crore in the next five years and this would help create 10 lakh job opportunities.
He also said that the ministry was reducing the time period for electrification of rail lines to save around Rs 10,000 crore per annum on fuel.
During the year, the railways introduced the country’s first semi-high speed fully AC train which has several modern facilities such as on-board LED TV, tea/coffee vending machine and bio-toilets.
The railways also started an SMS service about delayed trains with Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Tejas and Gatiman covered in the initial phase.
It also launced a new catering policy and initiated steps for 100 percent LED lighting at stations.
Under Project Swarn, 14 Rajdhani and 15 Shatabadi trains have been identified to significantly improve passenger experience.
If the efforts for a turnaround in the Railways yield results in the short term and there is boost to employment, it is likely to bring electoral dividends for the Narendra Modi government.
(Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance
By Arun Kumar Das,
New Delhi : The Indian Railways has cleared a Rs 12,000-crore proposal to equip electric locomotives with the latest European train protection system.
At its meeting on December 15, the Railway Board cleared the proposal to equip 6,000 electric locos with European Train Control System (ETCS) Level-II to help drivers – or pilots — to prevent rail mishaps, a senior Railway Ministry official told IANS.
Besides, the Board also decided to install the ETCS Level-II system on the entire 9,054 km-long Golden Quadrilateral route connecting the four metros to make it a fully accident-free corridor.
The entire project to ensure ETCS Level-II compliance is expected to cost around Rs 12,000 crore.
There are cases where accidents occur due to error of locomotive pilots who generally have to work in very stressful conditions.
Currently, the Railways has a basic automatic train protection system based on the ETCS Level-I specification to provide a back-up to loco pilots on a limited stretch.
Known as a “train protection warning system”, the facility based on ETCS Level-I has been implemented on about 342 km of rail route. Gatiman Express, running at 160 kmph between Nizamuddin and Agra, safely runs at this speed protected by the system.
However, it was decided to upgrade the system to put it on par with world standards as the ETCS Level-I has limitations.
In a train protection warning system, information regarding the condition of the signals ahead — whether it is showing red, yellow or green — is communicated to the locomotive and is shown on a display screen called DMI (Driver Machine Interface) in the front of the loco pilot.
In the ETCS Level-I system, this information regarding the condition of the signal ahead is periodically received in the loco whenever it passes over a device called “balise” which is fitted in the middle of the track at certain intervals.
Thus this has a limitation that the information regarding the signal ahead is received only when a loco passes over a balise — and the driver has to wait till he passes over the next balise to get updated information.
This disadvantage of the ETCS Level-I is overcome in ETCS Level-II, which ensures that the status of the signal ahead is continuously available in the loco through a wireless radio medium using a GSM-R (Global System for Mobile Communication-Railways) network.
GSM-R is similar to the mobile GSM network with some special features for Railway applications. With the status of the signal continuously available, the driver can now run the train more efficiently, as per the movement authority available to him, thereby improving overall speed and the section capacity of the route.
With the implementation of ETCS Level-II, the balise fitted on the track for communicating the status of signals are no longer required.
(Arun Kumar Das is a senior Delhi-based freelance journalist. He can be contacted at akdas2005@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate Governance
By Anand Singh,
New Delhi : Stinking and non-functioning toilets on Indian Railways — one of the world’s largest rail networks — may soon become a thing of the past. The national transporter is upgrading its bio-toilets to imported bio-vacuum toilets — the kind found in aircraft — an official said. The first 100 coaches with the new toilets will be attached to important trains like Rajdhani and Shatabdi and would be rolled out from January 2018.
“These bio-vacuum toilets will be odour-free and cut down water usage by over one-20th,” he said.
The official also said that the Chennai-based Integral Coach Factory (ICF) will roll out the first 100 coaches fitted with bio-vacuum toilets and that these will be attached to premium trains like the Rajdhani and Shatabdi expresses.
He also said there would be lesser chances of such toilets getting blocked.
The railways’ initiative to upgrade the existing bio-toilets came after pesistent complaints from passengers that these were getting blocked due to dumping of waste such as plastic bottles, paper and the like in the toilet pot.
Explaining the need of shifting to bio-vacuum toilets, the official said: “Saving water is a priority for the railways.”
“In bio-toilets, the water requirement per flushing is up to 15 litres. And the water doesn’t generate enough pressure to discharge the waste from the pots, resulting in a foul smell and blockage of the pot.
“The bio-vacuum toilet only requires about half a litre of water and all the waste is cleared through suction,” the official said, adding these had been tried out on a pilot basis in some trains.
The official said that the manufacturers of the bio-vacuum toilets have assured railways that the fabrication units would be set up in India.
Before the introduction of bio-toilets, lack of cleanliness on Indian trains, particularly in the toilets, was always a big issue. Until then, trains had no system to treat human waste, which was emptied on to the rail tracks.
In bio-toilets, human waste wasn’t supposed to be emptied on to the tracks but digested by anaerobic bacteria, which convert it into water and bio-gases that are released after disinfection. However, it was found that this hardly worked in practice.
The bio-toilets have been deployed in Indian trains over four years to 2017, at a cost of Rs 1,305 crore, but these are no better than septic tanks, IndiaSpend reported last week quoting a two-year-long study by the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M).
A staggering 93,537 “bio-digesters” — as the toilets are called –have been installed in mainline express and mail trains. However, sanitation experts and various studies — including those commissioned by the railways — have pointed out that most of the bio-toilets are ineffective or ill-maintained and the water discharged is no better than raw sewage.
Over 900 trains currently have bio-toilets either in some or all of their coaches.
(Anand Singh can be contacted at anand.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
New Delhi : Despite the rail accidents reported in the last one year, the Indian Railways has remained the number one choice for commuters as it ferried five crore more persons from April 1 to November 20 compared to last year, leading to an income increase of Rs 1,579 crore, a senior official said.
“The Railways, compared with last year, ferried five crore more passengers between April 1 and November 20,” Railway Board Member (Traffic) Mohammad Jamshed said here on Thursday.
“Between April 1 and November 20, 2016, Railways earned Rs 30,214 crore as passenger fare, compared with Rs 31,793 crore this year for the same period,” he said. The earnings through flexi fares was Rs 358 crore.
“This showcases public trust in the Railways,” he added.
At least 150 people died and over 300 passengers were injured after the Patna-Indore Express jumped the tracks near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh on November 20 last year. There have been rail accidents before and after this incident as well, leading to scores of deaths.
—IANS
