Eastern Railway bags nationalaward for excellence in Kavach deployment

Kolkata : Eastern Railway (ER) has been awarded the National Signalling and Telecommunications (S&T) Award 2026 by the Institution of Railway Signal Engineers (IRSE) for being the “Best Zonal Railway Showing Excellence in Kavach Deployment & Automatic Train Protection Implementation”. “For decades, train operations during dense fog, heavy rain, or peak traffic hours placed an immense cognitive load on loco pilots, who had to constantly peer out to spot physical signals. The risk of accidental Signal Passing at Danger (SPAD), sudden train rollbacks, or tracking realtime movements across dense corridors remained a persistent challenge. The successful deployment of Kavach Version 4.0 — India’s indigenous Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system conforming to the highest international SIL-4 safety standards — has permanently solved these vulnerabilities,” a senior ER official said. ER has set several golden benchmarks across Indian Railways by becoming the very first zonal railway to award Eastern Railway bags national award for excellence in Kavach deployment and execute the EPC (Engineering, Procurement & Construction) contract for the implementation of Kavach on the high-density Mission Raftar Howrah–New Delhi High Density Route. It is also the first railway zone to commission its portion of Kavach Version 4.0 on the Howrah–New Delhi corridor under Mission Raftar, and the first to commission Kavach Version 4.0 in automatic signalling territory. ER was also the first zone to successfully commission direct interfacing of Kavach with Electronic Interlocking systems. “The massive project covered 260 route km and involved deployment across 47 stations, including 11 with electronic interlocking.