PCT Portraits: The People Behind the Patents

On Track for Safer Trains

Mumbai, 1999 - another train collision on India’s western coast shook the Konkan Railway Corporation. Something had to be done. "We could not allow another life handed to us in trust to be lost in another accident routinely classified as human failure," declared Bojji Rajaram, then managing director of the railway.

Mr. Rajaram, an engineer with a track record of innovation, refused to believe that no technical solution could be found. Surely, he thought, in this age of instant radio communication, microprocessors and Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, it must be possible to devise a fail-safe system. Setting himself a "war like target" of 90 days to produce a prototype, he began work on a device which, mounted on two approaching trains, would enable them accurately to assess each other’s course and, in case of collision risk, to initiate an automatic braking system.

"The toughest challenge," Mr. Rajaram relates, "was how to make the GPS, which has only 20 - 30 meters accuracy, differentiate tracks which are only five meters apart." With no local GPS equipment or expertise to draw on, Mr. Rajaram bought a GPS over the Internet late one night, plugged it into his laptop, and enlisted the help of his five year old grandson to wander around the garden with it, while he scrutinized its capabilities. His resulting "Deviation Count theory" confounded the skeptics, and led to his anti-collision device, Raksha Kavach. In January 2006, the Indian Railway Ministry announced that the device, already installed on all Konkan Railway routes and many Northeast Frontier Railway routes, was to be extended to the entire broad gauge rail network by 2013.

And why the PCT? "Because," said Mr. Rajaram, "I wanted to save public expenditure, and to take the most cost-effective manner of protecting in a fair manner the IP rights." He cites a total of 17 patent applications, and potential royalty streams estimated by Price Waterhouse Cooper at up to Rupees 8000 crore (over US$1 billion) over three years. Uninterested by personal profit, however, Mr. Rajaram chose to assign all patent rights to the Indian nation via the state-owned Konkan Railway Corporation.

Now retired, Bojji Rajaram has lost none of his fervor: "I believe," he writes, "it is in the realm of reality to make food, travel, communication and dwelling virtually...