Two figures sit oddly together and are worth reading against each other. Safety expenditure budgeted for 2026-27 is Rs 1,20,389 crore, which is more than three times the 2013-14 figure and, strikingly, roughly 41 per cent of the entire Rs 2,93,030 crore railway budget grant. That is a very large share, and it reflects that 'safety-related activities' on Indian Railways is a broad category - track renewal, bridge rehabilitation, signalling, level crossing elimination - rather than a narrow line item. The Kavach rollout illustrates why safety spending is so capital-intensive: protecting a route requires equipment at every station and block section, RFID tags along the whole track, towers, fibre and a unit on every locomotive, so cost scales with route kilometres and locomotive fleet rather than with the number of accidents prevented. That also explains the pace. Field trials began in February 2016, national adoption came in July 2020, and version 4.0 was approved only in July 2024 - eight years from trial to a specification covering the full network, with 1,465 route km of version 3.2 deployment in between as the learning ground. Against a network of tens of thousands of route kilometres, the honest reading is that Kavach is at the start of deployment, not the end, and the 39 per cent budget utilisation by July suggests spending is tracking roughly to schedule with the bulk still to come.