New Delhi | Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday informed the Rajya Sabha that work on the automatic train protection system, which should have been done during the 1980s or 1990s, is being carried out now at a fast pace and is giving good results.

Replying to supplementaries during the question hour, the minister said what the entire world has installed long back, India is doing it now as previous governments did not carry out the same earlier.

"This is a very complex system. It has to be designed for each and every section of the train. Our team is working day and night to make sure that this thing, which should have been installed in the 1990s or in the 1980s, is being done from 2014 onwards.

"Something which the rest of the world has done way back, that work has now been taken up by Prime Minister Narendra Modi after he took the responsibility of the country. Since then the development work has started," the minister told the Upper House.

He said this is called the automatic train protection system. "This work is going on at a very fast pace. Throughout the country, the work is going on and Odisha is included as a part of this project. This is giving us very good result," he noted.

Vaishnaw said the 'Kavach' is a "very very complex system which has five major sub-systems".

Explaining the system, he said, it involves installing a complete optical fibre cable along the railway track, installing the telecom towers all along the railway tracks at a certain distance defined by the availability of the radio signals, and third it involves installing Kavach data centre, which is the edge data centre a every intermediate station.

Vaishnaw said the fourth sub-system is the track kavach system, which is installed every few hundred metres along the track and the final thing is the kavach device installed on the locomotive or on the train.