Union Minister Smt. Darshana Jardosh Inaugurates IRSE International Convention: Focus on Digital Transformation of Railways
The IRSE International Railway Convention 2023 opened at the state of the art Manekshaw Centre in Delhi Cantt today, with an extremely positive response from all the Railway Zones & Industry players. The 3-day Convention and Exhibition on Digital Transformation of Railways – Train to Track and Operation to Maintenance conforming to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of Modernisation of Indian Railways is being organised jointly by IRSE Bharat Section and IRSTE, under the aegis of the Ministry of Railway, Government of India.
The inauguration ceremony was graced by the presence of Union Minister of State for Railways & Textiles Smt. Darshana Jardosh, Chairman & CEO Railway Board Smt. Jaya Varma Sinha, Advisor to Minister of Railway Sh. Arun Saxena, Head of Cybersecurity in PMO Lt. Gen. M U Nair, Chairman IRSE Bharat Section Sh. A K Misra, Secretary IRSE Bharat Section Sh. Anshul Gupta, His Excellency Ambassador of Vietnam in India Mr. Nguyen Thanh Hai, Director IIT Roorkee Prof K K Pant and a large number of Dignitaries, Luminaries, Diplomats, Captains of the Industry, Premium Academic Institutions, Trade & Business Associations, Senior Government Officials and Business Delegations from India and across the world.
Digital Transformation of Railways has become an extremely important part of infrastructure modernisation. This endeavour shall not only catapult Indian railways into a developed railway but also generate several opportunities for industry to become a partner in this new vision of New India New Railways, for improving efficiency, creating capacity, improving productivity and most importantly enhancing Safety.
This Convention would focus on aspects like Modern Command and Control Signalling systems that enable train operations at higher speeds, which helps in creating additional line capacity, improves service quality and systems like LTE (4G/5G) band Kavach, CBTC etc. thereby increase the safety in train operations.
Addressing the August gathering, Smt. Darshana Jardosh said, “In our childhood, we used to be fascinated by Signal Cabins, where cabin man used to pull levers to operate semaphore signals. Now, this fascination has grown to a new dimension, where under KAVACH implementation not only safety feature of Signal Passed at Danger shall be taken care of, but also we shall first time have an indigenous Automatic Train Protection System dully integrated with an indigenously developed LTE/ 5G systems. Mechanical cabins to modern intelligent and user-friendly Centralised Traffic Control Centres (CTC), shall control and manage train control covering a number of stations from a single location fully powered by AI. It also provides a real time simulation of railway traffic centrally helping in real time traffic planning for punctual train operations. Controllers can manage train movements directly from CTC centre on real time basis. I am happy to state that Indian Industry has been successful in developing KAVACH, CTC and TMS system indigenously – a big Example of Atma Nirbhar Bharat. Once all the sections are equipped with KAVACH, CTC, it shall help in improving safety, throughout and reduce operational costs.”
Apart from the Technical Sessions by experts from India and abroad, there would be an Exhibition with a number of Booths displaying various innovative services, products and solutions created by the Industry for the Digitisation and Modernisation of Railways. More than 50 Exhibitors from across the globe would be participating in this mega convention.
A lot of sponsors and partners have expressed their solidarity with this International Railway Convention being organised specifically for modernisation and digital transformation of Railways.