The Wrong Wire at Bahanaga Bazar: The Balasore Collision of 2023, Kavach and Rail Signalling as Critical Infrastructure

B.A.P-I Retrospective, 2020 to 2024. This paper looks back at 2023 and the lesson it holds for the protection of India's critical infrastructure.

1. Introduction

Railway signalling is an infrastructure that passengers never see and only notice when it fails. Yet it is the system on which every movement on the network depends: it decides which line a train may take, when it may proceed and how fast. When signalling works, a dense mixed-traffic railway can run safely at high frequency. When it fails, the consequences are measured in lives. On 2 June 2023, at Bahanaga Bazar station in the Balasore district of Odisha, the consequences were catastrophic.

This case study looks back at the collision with three years of hindsight. It asks what the inquiry of the Commission of Railway Safety (CRS) and official statements established about the cause, what the railway administration changed, and how the Kavach automatic train protection (ATP) programme has developed since. Its argument is that Balasore should be read not only as a railway accident but as a lesson in the protection of a critical system, one that Indian Railways has acted upon and whose relevance extends wherever safety depends on the integrity of control circuits.

2. The Collision and Its Immediate Explanation

The sequence of events was set out by the Railway Board two days after the accident. The Coromandel Express, with a permitted speed of 128 km/h, and the Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express were both running within their speed limits; goods trains loaded with iron ore stood on both loop lines at the station. The Coromandel entered a loop line and struck a goods train, and its derailed coaches hit the last two coaches of the express passing on the adjacent line (The Week, 2023, Jun. 4). Board member Jaya Varma Sinha said there was no overspeeding, and preliminary findings pointed to an issue with signalling (The Week, 2023, Jun. 4). The official death toll was revised to 275 in the first days (The Week, 2023, Jun. 4); later reporting of the CRS findings put it at 292, with more than 1,000 injured (India Infra Hub, 2023, Jul. 4).

Restoration was swift: the railway minister announced that the down main line was restored at 12:05 hours (The Week, 2023, Jun. 4). The early official statements also narrowed the inquiry with care. Sinha said there was no issue with the electronic interlocking system itself, and the railway minister hinted at a signalling problem and at possible criminal tampering (International Railway Journal, 2023, Jun. 5). The question of Kavach also arose at once, and the railway minister's position, as reported, was that the accident had nothing to do with the absence of the anti-collision system (The Week, 2023, Jun. 4). At the time Kavach was in service on about 1,500 route-km, all on the South Central Railway, while only about 3,000 km of a network of 68,043 route-km had any anti-collision coverage (International Railway Journal, 2023, Jun. 5).

3. What the Commission of Railway Safety Found

The CRS submitted its report to the Railway Board at the end of June 2023, and the Railways decided not to make it public so as to avoid any influence on the parallel investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) (PTI, 2023, Jun. 30). Its findings, as reported, were clear. Lapses in an alteration of signalling circuits at Bahanaga Bazar produced a wrong signal for the Coromandel Express, which was routed into the loop line. The non-supply of a station-specific approved circuit diagram for the replacement of the electric lifting barrier at level crossing gate 94 was described as a wrong step that led to wrong wiring, and a field supervisory team modified the wiring diagram without replicating it. The report found lapses at multiple levels in the signalling and telecommunication (S&T) department (India Infra Hub, 2023, Jul. 4).

Two further findings give the case its lasting significance. A similar incident of wrong wiring and cable fault had occurred on 16 May 2022 at Bankranayabaz station in the Kharagpur division, and corrective action after that incident could have prevented the Balasore accident. Station staff, moreover, did not report repeated unusual behaviour of the points, which might have prompted remedial action. The CRS recommended updating wiring diagrams and circuit records at site, following standard practices with approved diagrams and an officer present for any alteration, deploying a separate team to test modified circuits before restoration, and reviewing disaster response with the national and state disaster response forces (India Infra Hub, 2023, Jul. 4). On 7 July 2023 the CBI arrested a senior section engineer, a section engineer and a technician (Business Today, 2023, Jul. 7).

4. The Administrative Response and the Kavach Programme

The Railway Board acted quickly. Within days of the accident it ordered double locking of relay rooms, of relay huts at level crossings housing signalling and telecommunication equipment, and of point and track circuit locations, with keys held by the station master and their issue and return logged; it also tightened disconnection and reconnection protocols for signal maintenance and alteration work (Business Today, 2023, Jun. 11). These were well-judged measures of access control, put in place before the CRS report was submitted, and they speak directly to its finding that circuit work had been carried out without adequate supervision and verification.

Kavach, India's indigenously developed ATP system, is the larger structural answer, and its progress since 2023 has been substantial. In July 2024 it was deployed on 1,465 route km and 144 locomotives on the South Central Railway, with work under way on about 3,000 route km of the Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah corridors (All India Radio, 2024, Jul. 24). By 30 June 2025 the government reported 1,548 route km deployed, trackside installation completed on 4,001 route km, 1,107 locomotives fitted, 5,856 km of optical fibre laid and 619 telecom towers installed, with Rs 2,015 crore spent; Kavach 4.0 had been approved by an Independent Safety Assessor for the 324 km Mathura-Kota section (The Week, 2025, Jul. 30). By December 2025 Kavach 4.0 was commissioned on 738 route km and trackside work was under way on 15,512 route km (IANS, 2025, Dec. 5).

The reform agenda continued to evolve. On 17 June 2024 the Kanchenjunga Express was struck by a goods train near New Jalpaiguri, killing 10 people. The CRS called it an accident waiting to happen, recorded 275 signalling failures in the automatic section of the Katihar division between January 2023 and June 2024, and urged the implementation of Kavach on top priority. The Railway Board responded by changing the authority form, standardising it across zones, strengthening loco pilot training and starting an action plan with the zones on signalling reliability (Business Standard, 2024, Jul. 17).

5. Signalling as Critical Infrastructure

One finds in the Balasore record a pattern familiar from the study of other critical sectors. On the record as reported, the electronic interlocking was not itself the weak point. The lessons lie in the human and organisational layer around the technology: documentation that did not match the field, alterations made without independent testing, an earlier warning that was not acted upon, and anomalies that were not reported. This is precisely the territory of critical infrastructure protection, which concerns not only defending systems against attack but ensuring the integrity of their configuration against error, negligence and tampering alike.

Kavach is essential, but it is a last line of defence, applying the brakes automatically when the loco pilot fails to keep the train within its limits (The Week, 2025, Jul. 30). It does not make the signalling layer beneath it trustworthy. The author has argued that India's resilience architecture requires an independent audit function, separate from the operator, that tests whether safety and continuity norms are actually kept, and a mandatory coordination platform to share the lessons of one failure across the system (Dash, 2025, Jan. 30). The CRS's own observation on the Bankranayabaz incident of 2022 makes the case for such network-wide sharing of lessons.

6. Recommendations: Governing the Railway's Nervous System

Four recommendations follow. First, signalling installations, their circuit records and their alteration processes should be designated and governed as critical assets, with configuration management that guarantees that the diagram held at the site matches the wiring in the field. Second, every significant alteration should be verified by a team independent of the one that carried it out, as the CRS recommended, and the results should be auditable. Third, near-misses and anomalies such as unusual behaviour of points should flow into a mandatory, network-wide reporting system so that a fault in one division becomes a lesson for all. Fourth, the Kavach rollout should be tracked against a published, measurable target, and its progress assessed within a national resilience measurement framework such as the Bharat National Resilience Index proposed by the author, so that rail safety is reported as a continuity indicator rather than only as an engineering programme (Dash, 2025, Oct. 28).

Balasore was a failure of a single circuit at a single station. Its toll shows how much rests on the integrity of systems that few people see. Indian Railways has responded with tighter access control, a revised maintenance discipline and an indigenous train protection system now being installed across thousands of route kilometres. Completing that work, from the wire to the brake, is a national responsibility well within India's capability.