CHENNAI: After a stellar listing on the NSE SME Board in the first week of January, the Bengaluru-based E To E Transportation Infrastructure Ltd (etoE Rail) in the first week of the January, company expects to get approval to implement Kavach 4.0 by the year-end.
Sourajit Mukherjee, Director & CEO, Etoe Rail, said, “For Kavach 4.0, there was re-tendering by the government. We have applied to the Research Designs and Standards Organisation (RDSO) for approval of Kavach 4.0, which is being jointly developed by Nova Technologies and Tata Elxsi. The approval is expected to come by year-end.”
Nova Control Tecnologix, a deep-tech company, is the subsidiary of E To E Transportation has entered into a strategic alliance with Tata Elxsi.
Kavach is an indigenously developed automatic train protection system for Indian Railways that prevents collisions by automatically applying brakes when a driver fails to respond, stopping signal overruns and keeping trains within prescribed speed limits, particularly in low-visibility conditions.
On January 2, the company got listed on NSE a share price of Rs 330.60 per share, a premium of nearly 90% from its issue price of Rs 164 to Rs 174 after raising Rs 84.22 crore through fresh issuance of 48.40 lakh shares. The proceeds will be used for working capital and general corporate purposes. Starting as designing and telecommunication services for railways 2010, the company quickly moved up the ladder to become India’s leading original equipment manufacturer in the rail transportation segment. It initially first provided services in critical safety applications, designing and telecommunications and signalling systems for Metro rail services in various countries.
The Etoe Rail partnered with OEMs like Thales Ground Transportation Systems (now Hitachi Rail), Siemens Mobility Global, part of Siemens AG, Alstom SA. Moreover, E TO E partnered with Thales Canada to provide designing, managing and installing signalling system and telecommunication services for the Hyderabad Metro in 2013 as latter’s outsourced client till 2021.
It partnered with Thales to install entire Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) system for Hyderabad, which was completed in 2021. For setting up CBTC, the company has collaborated with Siemens for Nagpur Metro phase 1 and Chennai Metro phase 1 as well as platform screen doors with Alstom for Mumbai Metro Line 3. It has been doing maintenance work of platform screen doors and signalling system for Chennai Metro since 2019.
Mukherjee said, “We will co-develop this product (Kavach 4.0). Nova is an OEM which is co-developing Kavach with the Tata Elxsi. The backend development for the product will be done both the companies. Tata Elxsi comes with an expertise of deep embedded systems on safety critical applications. Elxsi will take our domain knowledge in installing system integration and design of train control systems and their knowledge in embedded system part will be borrowed by us.” He also said that the company has signed an MoU with Syrma SGS to supply PCBs for development of Kavach 4.0.
“Most of our component suppliers are Indian partners. Our 99% of components are from India. There are a few semiconductors which our partners will have to import from other countries. However, with demand rising in the sector, we can expect in the future that these components will be made in India for Indian railways and supply it to other countries as well,” Mukherjee said, adding that the Union government has the target of installing Kavach 4.0, the next generation of India’s indigenous Automatic Train Protection (ATP) system, in high-density network areas (Tier 1 cities), connecting nearly 40,000 km in the next three to four years.