Under criticism due to series of train accidents and derailments in recent times, Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday assured that the Government will make every effort to implement automatic train-protection system Kavach in the right earnest.
Vaishnaw, however, did not give any timeline for implementation of Kavach on the entire railways network, but mentioned that smaller countries having much smaller railways networks took more than 20 years to implement the automatic train-protection system.
“I can assure you that no stone will be left unturned in the roll out of Kavach. We will work hard day and night and make every effort to install Kavach along every kilometer,” Vaishnaw said in a lengthy speech during which he also praised the efforts of 12 lakh railway employees for transporting two crore passengers in about 20,000 trains every day.
At one point of time the bureaucrat turned politician also lost his cool responding to Opposition members who were attacking him by terms like ‘Derailment Minister’ and ‘Reel Minister’.
Vaishnaw accused the Opposition Congress and “its social media troll army” of trying to amplify every small incident on the railways network to instill a sense of fear in more than two crore passengers who use the railway network everyday.
“The attempts by the Congress to spread misinformation will not succeed,” the Minister said, adding that attempts were made by the Congress and the Samajwadi Party to spread “incorrect” information about incidents at the Ayodhya railway station.
The Minister’s apparent reference to Congress leader and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s meeting with loco pilots at the New Delhi railway station last month had the Opposition members on their feet.
“Those who were busy making reels with loco pilots... Not one air conditioner was installed in running rooms during the UPA rule, and there were no locomotives with air-conditioned cabins,” Vaishnaw said.
Opposition members trooped to the Well of the House raising slogans ‘Railway Minister go back’, ‘Reel Minister haay, haay’ and ‘Reel Minister isteefa do’ before staging a walkout. Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Gaurav Gogoi took a jibe at Vaishnaw for not taking moral responsibility for train accidents and called him the ‘derailment minister.’
Replying to a debate in the Lok Sabha on the Demand for Grants, Vaishnaw slammed the previous UPA Government for allegedly not doing enough for ensuring safety of passengers. “Unfortunately, during the 58 years of Congress rule, the automatic train-protection system was not implemented on even one km on Indian Railways till 2014. I acknowledge that many experiments were carried out, but there was no focussed approach to take it to fruition,” Vaishnaw said.
Vaishnaw said Kavach 4.0 received certification by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation on July 17 this year and three manufacturers of the system have scaled up their production capabilities. “Two new manufacturers are also coming onboard, more than 8,000 engineers and technicians have been trained, six universities have introduced Kavach in their syllabus,” Vaishnaw said.
“Now, we are in such a situation that we can implement Kavach on a large scale. Tenders are in process for implementing Kavach on 9,000 km. In the next few months, we will start implementing Kavach 4.0 on 10,000 coaches,” the minister said.
He listed out steps taken by the government in eliminating unmanned level crossings across the railways network, implementation of electronic inter-locking at railway stations for better management of train movements.
“The style of working of the UPA and our Government is different. Earlier, there was no focussed approach in dealing with an important system such as railways. We now have a focussed approach under (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi ji’s leadership,” Vaishnaw said.
