New Delhi, May 11, 2026, 15:40 (IST)
Indian Railways signed off on a ₹362-crore plan to extend Kavach—its homegrown automatic train protection tech—across almost 1,478 route km throughout Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. The expansion pushes the safety system further into the Northern Railway’s coverage. Kavach alerts loco pilots, and in specific risky situations, it steps in to activate the brakes itself.
Kavach is shifting gears—from limited commissioning to a much broader rollout. According to the Railway Ministry’s March update, the system had been deployed on 3,103 route km, while installation continued across another 24,427 km, targeting busy, high-traffic corridors.
This comes as Jammu and Kashmir’s rail network undergoes a transformation. According to the Associated Press, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in June 2025 flagged off the 272-km Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla route, marking the first rail link between the Kashmir Valley and the Indian plains.
The latest package puts Kavach on track for installation across 1,012 route km in the remaining Firozpur Division stretches, with costs pegged at ₹241 crore. Over in the Jammu Division, some 466 route km are slated to get the upgrade—price tag, close to ₹121 crore—including Jalandhar City Junction-Jammu Tawi-Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Katra, Batala-Pathankot Junction, and Banihal-Baramulla sections.
“The sanctioned works include provision of Kavach over nearly 1,478 route kilometres,” the Ministry of Railways told The Indian Express. For clarity, route kilometres (RKm) count the route’s total length, without multiplying for extra tracks in multi-track sections. The Indian Express
Kavach is designed to reduce dangers linked to human mistakes and limited visibility. According to the ministry’s previous rollout statements, the system guards against Signal Passing at Danger, or SPAD—railway-speak for trains going past stop signals—and steps in to prevent both overspeeding and potential head-on or rear-end crashes.
The Northern Railway move comes on the heels of several Kavach-related green lights elsewhere on the network—think equipment installs for 232 Southern Railway locos, optical-fibre rollouts in North Central, and fresh electronic interlockings over at South Central. Punjab-J&K, then, is just one slice of a broader national push on safety and signalling, not some isolated approval.
There’s nothing compact about the hardware. According to The Statesman, which quoted an official, the approved plans call for stationary Kavach units, 40-metre towers for communications, and antenna setups. These components are all critical—locomotives, signals, and trackside gear need that infrastructure to communicate.
Still, approval doesn’t translate to real-world protection just yet. Back in March, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw described Kavach in Parliament as a “very complex system with five sub-systems.” According to the ministry, deployment hinges on setting up station units, laying RFID tags along the tracks, installing telecom towers, optical fibre, plus hardware in the locomotives. A single bottleneck anywhere in the chain can hold up the whole rollout. News On Air
What matters for passengers isn’t how big the sanction is. It’s down to when those specific sections finish their installation, go through testing and commissioning, and when trains running in those areas are fully hooked into the system.
