Electronic Sensors Will Start Phasing Out Conventional Railway Track Inspection

Electronic sensors will soon play a big role in improving railway safety, phasing out the conventional practice of daily track inspection by about 125,000 engineers.

Hoping to put an end to the blight of derailment, the government plans to introduce electronic sensors that will cover tens of thousands of kilometres of the vast and ageing railway network. Following three serious derailments in the past three months, the electronic sensor project will be part of a wider plan to improve railway safety, to which Finance Minister Arun Jaitley allocated $15 billion in last week’s budget.

“We will be using wheel-based sensors and fixed monitors at certain positions on the track to measure whether they are fractured,” said Hanish Yadav, an adviser to Rail Minister Suresh Prabhu. He added that the sensors would take several years to install throughout the broad-gauge network.

Prabhu has pledged $137 billion until 2020 to overhaul the system, with the support of private sector money and foreign investment to help rebuild stations and build new services.

“In over 65 years (since independence) there was no money to be spent on new technology,” said Yadav. “With the money they had, the best they could do was simply to maintain their assets.” Of the 400 stations across the country that are due to be upgraded, only a handful have been approved. Of these, only one is designed by a private company, a model the government hopes to encourage.

Meanwhile, an eye-catching project to build a $15 billion high-speed link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad has been signed by the Japanese and Indian governments, but New Delhi is yet to allocate its $2.7 billion portion of the funds needed to build it.

“The root cause of all our problems has been that there was not enough money to invest in capital infrastructure,” said Sandeep Upadhyay, chief executive of Mumbai-based Centrum Infrastructure Advisory, adding, for the first time money has been made available to do that. “Now we have to get on with spending it.”