The recent accident at Fatehpur when the Howrah-Kalka mail derailed highlights once again the urgent need to look at suitable alternatives to improve railroad safety in India. The number of people killed on the tracks and through other railroad accidents has steadily increased over the years and accounts for about eight per cent of accidental deaths. In 2010 alone, of the 50 major railroad accidents worldwide 14 were in India. Although the Railway Vision 2020 of the Indian Railways unequivocally points to making railway operations accident-free through the use of advanced technologies, progress on this front has lagged intention.
Communication plays a very important role for the safe day-to-day operations of rail systems to prevent or to minimise the effect of all types of railroad accidents from sabotage, unmanned railroad crossings and derailments. But thanks to political ploys, important technology interventions to upgrade the communication and signalling systems and eliminate rail accidents as set out in the vision document is still to make visible marks in India.
Worldwide, advanced rail traffic management systems such as the radio system called the Global Systems for Mobile - Railways (GSM-R), which provides voice and data communication between trackside and on-board systems, are being deployed. GSM-R can complement the Train Control System that provides signalling information to the train-based computer to calculate the maximum allowable speed depending on track conditions and allows it to slow down automatically if required. GSM-R has been implemented by most of the European railroad corporations and also in China and Algeria.
Indian Railways, being one of the largest railroad entities in the world, is an active member of the International Union for Railways that advocates GSM-R. But this widely-used digital wireless system is yet to be implemented country-wide, although the project was kick-started in 2008. Stated to cover initially the North Central and East Central zones, it has only been implemented on a 270-km stretch between Mathura and Jhansi in the North Central railways in 2008 under the Mobile Train Radio Communication project. Progress appears to have stalled since then.
Another complementing digital wireless technology system known as TErrestrial Trunked RAdio (TETRA) has been chosen by Russian Railways (the first one to do so in 2004), Danish Railways, London Underground and Delhi Metro. An indigenous version of this technology is also under planning, to be developed at Centre for Development of Advanced Computing(C-DAC).
Premier institutes such as Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO) of Indian Railways have been actively involved in developing the Technology Mission for Rail Safety programmes that were initiated in 2005. Although the objectives for all these programmes were met in 2008, including track-side monitoring and derailment detection and on-board diagnostics, the implementation has been limited.
The focus of RailTel, formed in 2000, as a Public Sector Unit (PSU) under the ministry of railways with an infrastructure provider licence, seems to be on providing customer and enterprise solutions as a competitor to the country’s numerous telecom companies. RailTel is yet to make an impact with its huge bandwidth resources across the railways’ 63,000 route km. Instead of focusing on services such as National Long Distance for which RailTel, interestingly, has a licence, is it not time for it to serve the humongous telecom needs of its parent organisation?
While the 2G spectrum scandal still dominates the headlines, it is time for the government to consider providing an optimal amount of radio spectrum for the communication needs of the railways. The draft National Frequency Allocation Table does not specify in detail the spectrum allotted for the technologies described here. The method of allocation, if it has already been reserved, is also not clear. For example, the paired spectrum in the 900 band — 876-880 MHz / 921-925 MHz in which most of the standard GSM-R systems work overlaps with the 869-889 MHz downlink spectrum block allotted for CDMA operations in the country. For TETRA, the lower frequencies in the 300-400 MHz range are more appropriate but we have not seen any notification from the government regarding the allocation of these.
Thanks to intense competition, standardisation of technologies and associated adoption, commercial mobile services have brought immense benefits to Indian society. There is no reason that the same technology cannot improve the safety of more than 14 million passengers who commute daily through the massive network of Indian Railways. All it needs is some political will to do so.
Suryanarayanan Balasubramanian, Project Manager; Dr V Sridhar, Research Fellow; and C S Raman, Principal Engineer; are with Sasken Communication Technologies.
These views are personal
