NEW DELHI: Marking Engineers Day in the national capital, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) inaugurated its ambitious state-of-the-art laboratory at Shastri Park for development of an indigenously built Communication Based Train Control (CBTC) based signalling technology for Metro railway.
It also launched i-ATS (Indigenous - Automatic Train Supervision System), an important sub-system of the signalling system on Tuesday. The lab was inaugurated by Urban Ministry Secretary Durga Shankar Mishra in the presence of DMRC’s Managing Director Mangu Singh, Shikha Gupta, Director, BEL, and other senior officials from DMRC and BEL.
“It is a proud occasion to start something like this which is going to add to our strength on the Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative.... I am fully confident that this Indian system will also be sold outside and we will be the leaders in this area as well,” said Mishra. Currently, the signalling system in Delhi Metro is controlled by foreign companies and the systems such as the CBTC are primarily controlled by the European countries and Japan.
However, aiming to reduce the dependency on foreign countries and to develop their own technologies, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (Mo- HUA) had decided to develop the system indigenously under the ‘Make in India’ initiative. According to a senior DMRC official, the CBTC system will take time but the i-ATS, a computerbased system, which manages train operations will be developed sooner and will be upgraded first in Delhi Metro’s Line-1 from Rithala to Shaheed Sthal Bus Adda in Ghaziabad and Phase IV. To develop ATS, DMRC has also signed an MoU with Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL).
Currently, the ATS system is run on Pink and Magenta Line for high frequency. Along with DMRC, Niti Aayog, MoHUA, Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) and CDAC are also part of this development. “The ATS system can work with Train Control & Signaling Systems of different suppliers and at different levels. It is also suitable for introduction in Indian Railways which is now introducing Centralized Train control, on a large scale, which uses part of ATS functions,” said the official. DMRC also signed another agreement on Tuesday with BEL for indigenous development of “Rolling Stock Drivers’ Training System” to provide driving and troubleshooting skills training.