Saving Civil Life on Railway Tracks

 Saving Civil Life on Railway Tracks — My TIDS Proposal & Alstom's Parallel

 Innovation

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Respected Shri Ashwini Vaishnawji,

Namaste.

I write to you as a 92-year-old blogger and policy thinker who has been proposing technology-driven solutions for India's railways for several years.

The subject of this letter is the tragic and preventable loss of wildlife — and occasionally human lives — at the intersection of railway tracks and forest corridors. I call this the "Civil Life" problem: the daily, silent toll on our nation's biodiversity caused by train-animal collisions.

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MY PRIOR PROPOSAL — TIDS

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Some years ago, I proposed a Track Intrusion Detection System (TIDS) on my blog (myblogepage.blogspot.com — search: TIDS), envisioning AI-powered cameras, sensors, and acoustic/light-based deterrents placed along forest-abutting railway corridors to:

• Detect animal presence in or near the track zone in real time

• Alert loco pilots, station masters, and control rooms with sufficient lead time

• Repel animals using sound or light signals — scaring them away rather than letting a collision happen

This was not just detection — it was detection + deterrence, a two-stage system.

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WHAT ALSTOM IS NOW DOING IN SWEDEN

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I was therefore deeply interested to read about Alstom's wildlife protection initiative, currently being validated in Sweden in collaboration with partner Flox and customers TiB and VR.

Alstom describes their system as combining:

• Advanced vision systems (cameras / AI)

• A trained brain (intelligent algorithms)

• Tailored repellent acoustics — to herd animals away from tracks

The inspiration, Alstom says, is the ancient practice of "herding."

This is precisely the two-stage logic I described in TIDS — detect, then deter.

Sweden currently records approximately 5,000 wildlife collisions annually on its railways — nearly 14 per day. India's numbers, given our far larger rail network and rich biodiversity (elephants, tigers, leopards), are likely far higher.

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WHAT INDIAN RAILWAYS HAS ALREADY STARTED

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I am aware that Indian Railways has already taken encouraging steps:

• Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) has deployed a fibre-optic Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) based IDS across 64 km of elephant corridors in West Bengal and Assam, with plans to expand to 146+ km by April 2026.

• AI-enabled sensors are being installed at identified wildlife corridor locations to alert loco pilots 0.5 km in advance.

• Rajasthan's Forest Department is now deploying AI-based surveillance in wildlife sanctuaries.

These are welcome steps. But they are largely detection-only. The missing piece is deterrence — the acoustic/light-based repellent layer that Alstom is now validating in Europe.

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MY REQUEST

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I humbly request that the Ministry of Railways:

1. Consider formally integrating a deterrence layer (acoustic repellents, directional light signals) alongside the DAS/IDS systems already being rolled out — completing the TIDS vision.

2. Explore a Technology Partnership with Alstom's Innovation Station (Stockholm) to adapt their wildlife herding system for Indian conditions — our animals, our forest densities, our terrain.

3. Extend the IDS/TIDS rollout beyond elephant corridors to include tiger reserves, leopard zones, and migratory bird corridors, in coordination with the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.

4. Consider this a "Civil Life" initiative — a branding that gives wildlife protection the same policy urgency as passenger safety.

Every animal killed on a railway track is a loss from our national natural heritage — and every such collision also delays trains, damages locomotives, and demoralises loco pilots who carry the trauma for life.

With AI, acoustics, and optical sensing now mature technologies, there is no reason this problem should persist.

I remain, as always, available to elaborate on any of these ideas.

With warm regards and deep respect,

Hemen Parekh

Founder, RecruitGuru.com | Blogger since 2016

hemenparekh.in | myblogepage.blogspot.com | hemenparekh.ai

Mumbai — 15 June 2026