NCRTC, BEL sings MoU to develop platform screen doors

The MoU was signed by NCRTC Director (Systems) Navneet Kaushik and Manoj Kumar, BEL's Executive Director (National Marketing).

The NCRTC and BEL, a government of India enterprise under the Ministry of Defence, will indigenously develop PSD system for the upcoming MRTS/RRTS/high-speed rail projects, both in India and abroad.

According to NCRTC, the PSDs act as a safety barrier between the passengers on the platform and the train.

The PSDs also help in crowd management and prevent any untoward incidents like jumping or falling on the track.

The NCRTC said that till date, the PSDs used in India were imported.

The NCRTC said in a statement that it will design and develop PSDs for different rail-based systems in India and abroad in collaboration with BEL.

"This will be a first and one of its kind initiative where indigenously developed PSD system will be used in India and will be exported globally as well," it said.

NCRTC Managing Director Vinay Kumar Singh said, "NCRTC is working continuously towards identifying items that are presently being imported for MRTS/RRTS/high-speed rail projects and make strategies to bring such technologies to India through RRTS project to trigger domestic capacity development."

"Indigenous development of PSDs is a step towards realising the vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat. Made in India PSDs will not only benefit the upcoming RRTS corridors, but will also benefit the upcoming and existing BRTS/metro rail systems/high-speed rail projects of the country," Singh said.

The NCRTC, which is developing the 82 km, high-speed Delhi-Meerut Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) corridor, has accorded utmost importance to passenger safety right from the planning and designing stage of the project.

With a design speed of 180 km per hour and high-frequency operations of every 5-10 minutes, the 82 km corridor connecting Sarai Kale Khan in Delhi to Modipuram in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh is expected to reduce the journey time to about 1 hour from the present 3-4 hours. The RRTS will have multimodal hubs to ensure smooth interchange with other transport modes.

The 82 km corridor is supposed to have a 5.6 km long tunnel between New Ashok Nagar in Delhi to Sahibabad in Uttar Pradesh and an underground station at Anand Vihar.