Indian Railways chugs into IT space

NEW DELHI

FEBRUARY 27, 2007

In the eleventh Five Year Plan, investment in IT projects will be increased
to several thousand crores of rupees to harness the immense possibilities
offered by information technology in the interest of Indian Railways, Lalu
Prasad, the minister for Railways, said.

Presenting the Railway Budget for 2007-08 on Monday, he said, "IT
applications will be deployed to increase passenger and freight earnings,
improve the image of the Railways in the eyes of the customer, reduce operating
costs, ensure effective utilization of human and physical resources and to help
the top management in arriving at long-term policy decisions by developing MIS
& LRDSS."

"A commercial portal will be developed in the next three years for yield
management, specially to attract traffic for returning empties and filling up
vacant seats. All modules of FOIS including rolling stock maintenance and
examination, revenue apportionment, crew management, control charting COIS, etc.
will be integrated and implemented in a time bound manner for completion by
2010."

He also said that Railways will go for Enterprise Resource Program (ERP) in
its production units. "ERP packages will be implemented in workshops,
production units and selected zonal railways. A common website integrating the
more than 50 different websites of Railways will be developed with built in
facilities like e-payment and e-tendering."

For an integrated approach in IT, CRIS will be entrusted with coordination of
all IT applications of the Railways and for development of a comprehensive
vision on IT. CRIS will be developed as an autonomous and empowered
organization, drawing officers from various Railways services, the minister
said.

Inviting Indian IT companies to participate in this project, Prasad said,
"Indian IT companies have hoisted the national flag all over the world. We
invite these companies to take part in various IT projects of the Railways under
public private partnership."

Stating that the scheme of booking e-ticket through Internet from home had
become very popular, the minister said: "To further encourage e-ticket
usage, we have decided to reduce the per e-ticket charge for Sleeper class and
AC classes e-tickets from Rs 25 to Rs 15 and Rs 40 to Rs 20 respectively."

"Besides this minimum charge there will be an additional charge of Rs 5
per passenger for booking of every additional passenger subject to the maximum
charges for one ticket being Rs 25 in sleeper class and Rs 40 for AC
classes," he announced.

The railway minister said that under the existing Passenger Reservation (PRS)
system, reservation charts are taken out a few hours before the departure of
trains. Often, due to unforeseen circumstances, several passengers with
reservations do not travel. "As a result many berths remain vacant. Since
this information is not fed into the PRS system, passengers on board the trains
or waitlisted passengers at ensuing stations are not aware of the vacancy
position. Therefore we have proposed to provide hand held computer terminals to
TTEs, in reserved coaches," he said.

"The TTE will feed in the current vacancy position, coach wise and berth
wise in to these handheld terminals. These terminals will be directly linked to
the PRS system to transmit the berth reservation position from running trains to
the PRS system. Based on this information the PRS will allot vacant berths to
waitlisted passengers at ensuing stations. Handheld terminals will be made
available to the TTEs as a pilot project on four pairs of trains next year.
These would include three Shatabdi Express trains running between New Delhi-Amritsar,
New Delhi-Dehradun and New Delhi-Ajmer, and Golden Temple Express," he
announced.

From June to September 2007, train enquiry call centres will start
functioning in all four regions of the country.

"By dialing the telephone number 139, passengers will be able to obtain
information about arrival and departure of trains, seat availability etc. at
local call rates from any part of the country," the minister said.

The Railway minister informed the Parliament that the call centres
international level facilities like SMS alert will be provided. In future call
centres will provide several services like railway ticketing, taxi booking and
hotel booking apart from host of other services.

The ministry also plans to introduce a pilot project on Central Railway for
issuing suburban tickets through multi-purpose smart cards.

The minister also proposed to introduce smart rail travel cards for the
passengers and to provide e-tickets in petrol pumps and post offices.