Indian Railways will begin using an AI-based surveillance system in an attempt to prevent elephant deaths on train tracks. There will be 700 km of deployed monitoring systems along routes that cross forests.
“We have identified forest areas in Assam, West Bengal, Odisha, Kerala, Jharkhand, and some parts of Chhattisgarh and Tamil Nadu that are home to elephants,” Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Wednesday. The Minister added that the technology was tested on a 150-kilometer stretch of Assam last year and proved to be highly advantageous. It was developed by the railroads in collaboration with a few start-ups.
The minister said, “You can call it ‘Gajraj System,'” when asked if the railroads had given the system an official name. The minister mentioned the system’s introduction in the NFR when speaking with reporters.
The top things to understand about the surveillance system powered by AI
1. The AI-based monitoring system, according to the Railway Minister, can notify loco pilots in advance of the appearance of elephants on tracks.
2. The 700 km of rails would require ₹181 crore to accomplish the project in its entirety.
3. Vaishaw also said that this technique has helped preserve a lot of elephants up to this time. “We made some improvements in the system based on our field experience, and now it detects the presence of elephants on tracks with 99.5 percent accuracy,” he said. Furthermore, he mentioned that his representatives are in communication with the forest authorities to find additional sites of this kind in order to broaden the project’s scope.
4. The Northeast Frontier Railway praised the technology and declared that it had eliminated elephant deaths from train crashes when it was implemented in 11 elephant routes in the Northeast earlier in September 2023.
5. In December 2022, the Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) installed the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) in 11 elephant corridors, five of which were located in the Lumding division and six in the Alipurduar division.
The NFR reports that over the last eight months from the system’s inception in December 2022 to July of this year, 9,768 alarms were sounded, or an average of 41 alerts every day. It further said that there have been no reports of train-elephant collisions along these 11 lines since the system’s introduction.
How does the system function?
The train controller, station master, train drivers, and other stakeholders receive alerts from the system each time an elephant enters the track, and they take appropriate action to avert the impending risk.
According to government statistics, the bulk of the nation’s 20 annual elephant deaths from train crashes occur on the Northeast Frontier Railway. According to authorities, the IDS’s success gives hope that mishaps like this will eventually come to an end.
