South Eastern Railway has reported that its Kharagpur Electric Loco Shed commissioned the Kavach automatic train protection system on ten locomotives between 25 July and 1 October 2026, with two more installed and awaiting commissioning and two further installations in progress. That is fourteen locomotives at a single shed over roughly ten weeks. In the same statement the zone, one of the zonal railways of Indian Railways, covering parts of West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand, said two locomotives had been fitted with RFID asset tags for automatic identification and tracking across the network, with three more under way, and claimed Kharagpur as its first shed to fit conventional electric freight locomotives with RFID asset tags.
Those are two separate programmes, run by different parts of the organisation for different reasons, and most coverage runs them together. Doing so buries the point. Both are RFID, both sit in the same UHF band, and after this round of work a locomotive leaving Kharagpur can be carrying two unrelated RFID systems that, on everything published, know nothing about each other.
Kavach is an RFID story before anyone mentions asset tags
Kavach is India’s indigenously developed Automatic Train Protection system, adopted as the national ATP standard in July 2020 after first passenger-train field trials in February 2016. It brakes automatically if the driver does not respond to a warning, prevents signal passed at danger events, enforces speed restrictions and gives continuous cab signalling through the Driver Machine Interface. Version 4.0 was approved on 16 July 2024 by the Research Designs and Standards Organisation, the standards and design body of Indian Railways, and is specified to SIL-4, the most demanding safety integrity level in railway functional safety.
The position input underneath all of that is RFID. When Kavach 4.0 was commissioned on South Central Railway in September 2026 we covered the trackside half in detail: passive UHF tags at 865 to 867 MHz, the band allocated to the technology in India, built to specification RDSO/SPN/196, required to read reliably at train speeds of at least 200 km/h, and installed at density, 3,746 tags across three sections on that commissioning alone.
The locomotive end is the other half, and it is a reader installation. Each Kavach loco unit carries two RFID readers in hot standby, mounted underneath the locomotive body, rated to 200 km/h and to at least IP65 outside the locomotive or IP64 inside. Locomotives work out distance travelled from wheel rotations, and that odometry drifts, because wheels wear down, slip under power and lock up under braking. Every trackside tag the reader passes resets the on-board calculation to a surveyed location, with tags installed in duplicate for redundancy. Each read is an ordinary passive UHF transaction, the reader supplying the energy and the tag replying with its identifier; the terms used here are in our RFID glossary.
So fourteen locomotives fitted with Kavach means twenty-eight UHF readers fitted. Trackside tags on their own do nothing: they are inert until a fitted locomotive passes over them, which is why loco shed throughput, not tag installation, decides when a route is actually protected.
Fourteen locomotives against the national arithmetic
A Press Information Bureau release from the Ministry of Railways dated 19 March 2025, giving progress to February 2025, put Kavach in 795 locomotives, with trackside equipment on 3,727 route km and Kavach at 664 stations. It confirmed that the project for equipping 10,000 locomotives had been finalised and that 69 loco sheds had been prepared to do the fitting, at roughly Rs 50 lakh per km of trackside and station equipment and Rs 80 lakh per locomotive.
By 31 July 2026, according to figures reported by Indian Infrastructure on 7 August 2026, Kavach was installed in 6,290 locomotives, with work taken up to equip a further 7,190 locomotives and 1,200 EMU and MEMU trains. Kavach 4.0 had been commissioned on 2,633 route km of the two high density routes, 1,423 route km from Delhi to Mumbai and 1,210 route km from Delhi to Howrah, and trackside work was being taken up across 21,794 route km, with equipment installed on 7,726 route km of that.
From 795 locomotives in February 2025 to 6,290 in July 2026 is a hard acceleration, and it shows the sheds have found a rhythm. But 6,290 fitted plus 7,190 under way is still short of a requirement already sanctioned at 10,000 locomotives, and every one of them has to pass through a shed exactly like Kharagpur. The pace-setter is Northern Railway’s Ghaziabad Electric Loco Shed, reported in November 2024 to have deployed Kavach on 100 locomotives and, according to The Pioneer, to have reached its 300th installation on 16 May 2026, the fastest in Indian Railways. South Eastern Railway’s own stated plan, reported in November 2024, is to complete Kavach deployment across its network by 2028. Fourteen locomotives in ten weeks is real progress, and it is also the unit of work that deadline is made of.
The asset tags are a completely different programme
The RFID asset tagging at Kharagpur belongs to the Automatic Identification and Data Capture programme for rolling stock, usually shortened to AIDC. It is led by the Rolling Stock department, with solutions developed by the Centre for Railway Information Systems, the IT arm of Indian Railways, working with GS1 India, the Indian member organisation of the global standards body behind the barcode. The Railway Board sanctioned two works for it totalling Rs 112.96 crore. Its purpose has nothing to do with signalling: it is the shift from time-based maintenance, where a vehicle is attended to on a calendar, to condition-based maintenance driven by its own history.
Architecturally it is close to the inverse of Kavach. The tag goes on the vehicle and the reader sits at the trackside, roughly 3,500 fixed readers planned, reporting to a central control centre over GS1’s Low Level Reader Protocol. Indian Railways specified the GS1 GIAI-202 standard, the Global Individual Asset Identifier encoding, because connectivity along the network is patchy: the tags carry a user memory area, so a reader can pull the vehicle’s information off the tag without reaching a backend system. CRIS-designed GIAI-202 tags have been field-tested at 182.7 km/h.
The programme is well behind its original intent. The target was all rolling stock, roughly 350,000 vehicles, tagged by 2021, and it was missed. Published progress runs to roughly 22,000 wagons and 1,200 coaches, later reported as around 23,000 wagons against a December 2022 target of covering the whole wagon fleet. More recent totals are not publicly confirmed, so nobody outside Indian Railways knows the current number. What the South Eastern Railway statement does show is that locomotives, as opposed to wagons and coaches, are only now being tagged at shed level, and in single figures.
Two RFID systems, one locomotive, one band
Put the two programmes on the same vehicle and the question writes itself. A Kavach-fitted, asset-tagged locomotive leaves Kharagpur carrying two UHF readers underneath its body, reading trackside tags at 865 to 867 MHz for safety-critical positioning, and a GS1 GIAI-202 asset tag that fixed trackside readers in the same band interrogate for identification and maintenance. Same frequency allocation, same vehicle, two departments, two standards lineages, one certified to SIL-4 and the other not safety-related at all.
There is a respectable argument that this is exactly right. Mixing an administrative identification system into a SIL-4 safety case is an expensive way to make that case harder to defend, and separation keeps the two sets of equipment on separate maintenance and approval regimes. There is an equally respectable argument that a railway installing two independent RFID populations in one band, on one fleet, through one shed, pays twice for surveying, mounting, cabling, testing and spares, and passes up the obvious prize: a locomotive that already knows its own identity and its own surveyed position and could report both from one system. Nothing published resolves which it is.
That is the question worth putting to CRIS and to RDSO. Do the Kavach on-board readers and the AIDC asset tags share any infrastructure at all, in reader hardware, antenna placement, survey data, the backhaul carrying reads to a control centre, or the band planning that keeps two tag populations from reading into each other at a station throat? Or is a locomotive leaving an Indian loco shed in 2026 simply carrying two independent RFID systems, fitted by two teams, that happen to use the same radio? There is more on identifying vehicles in motion in our vehicle tracking coverage.
Read more at https://ser.indianrailways.gov.in/view_section.jsp?lang=0&id=0,1,1683,1690
