Since 2011 till August 2024, the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) has reported 71 incidents of elephants being hit by trains, resulting in 108 elephant casualties
The extensive network of Indian Railways cuts across dense forests, habitats of various wild species. In many states, railway tracks passing through animal habitats have led to numerous accidents and causalities of animals. Train-elephant collision is a major concern and various initiatives were also attempted by authorities to reduce the menace. But the only solution to avoid such incidents is fencing of the railway tracks.
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The general manager of Integral Coach Factory, U Subba Rao talking to a team of journalists from Assam who were taken to Tamil Nadu by Press Information Bureau (PIB) said, “Only solution to avoid train-animal collision is to fence the tracks,” adding that there are technologies like Kavach which can detect any oncoming train.
Kavach is an Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system indigenously developed by Indian Railways through Research Designs & Standards Organisation (RDSO). Initially it was known by the name Train Collision Avoidance System (TCAS). Kavach was adopted by Ministry of Railways as the National ATP System in July 2020.
It needs to be mentioned that Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Chennai, is a premier production unit of Indian Railways manufacturing passenger coaches. ICF is the first of its kind to be established after independence for the manufacture of lightweight, all-steel and all-welded integral railway passenger coaches. The factory was set up in 1955 with Swiss collaboration. ICF continues to experiment with design & development of new type coaches such as self propelled and other special type coaches.
The Vande Bharat trains are being constructed in ICF and all these trains are installed with Kavach.
Talking about Northeast Frontier Railway, a senior official of NFR said that since 2011 till August 2024 there were 71 incidents of trains hitting elephants that resulted in 108 casualties of elephants. Out of these incidents, 18 were reported in identified elephant corridors and 53 were reported in unidentified locations.
Talking about Vande Bharat trains, which is the fastest train in India, there are three routes in NFR where these ply – New Jalpaiguri (NJP) to Howrah, Guwahati to NJP and NJP to Patna.
The official said, “One incident of a cow being hit happened last in August last year near Bongaigaon involving Guwahati - NJP Vande Bharat express. No casualty or damage happened at that time.”
The official further said that in the coming days the region may get more Vande Bharat trains.
Till now 61 Vande Bharat trains are functioning across India constructed in ICF. By the end of this year around 110 Vande Bharats will be ready and functional.
Indian Railways has planned to deploy Kavach 4.0, which is an upgraded version, on a total of 52 Vande Bharat trains. As of now, the Vande Bharat train services have been deployed with the Kavach 3.2 version. Besides, Indian Railways is likely to install Kavach 4.0 on 10,000 of its locomotives with further plans to implement it on 5,000 route km (rkm) of its tracks annually. Though Kavach will help reduce train accidents the train- animal collision issue still remains unresolved.
As a pilot project the NFR also installed an optical fibre-based intrusion detection system (IDS) along the elephant infested stretches in many areas in Assam, including the Rangia-Deepor Beel stretch.
The optical fibre network detects the presence of animals, big and small, through vibrations, and sends real-time alerts to the intrusion monitoring cell, station masters and loco pilots. The signal for different animals is different.
A senior official in NFR talking to GPlus said, “It is true that fencing the tracks is the only permanent solution to avoid train-animal collision, but in animal corridors if the tracks are fenced, the movement of the animals will be affected.” He said that the IDS is installed as a pilot project and if it is a success the solution can be derived.
