News Analysis

Giving an IT boost to Indian Railways

Faiz Askari reports on the various initiatives that CRIS has chalked out for the Indian Railways

The Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) has come a long way since 1986. With a team of professionals and R&D efforts, CRIS aims to be a leader in this transport segment.

Describing CRIS’ focus is M R Ramakrishnan, Managing Director of CRIS. “The centre was started mainly because certain issues needed to be tackled separately, maybe with the use of information technology. But the major concern was to avoid duplication of effort by individual railway boards, and to ensure standardisation of IT hardware and software on the railways.”

Apart from this, CRIS was set up to cater to the need for developing computer applications for the railways. This included the need for developing expertise in highly specialised fields like operations research, simulation, expert systems, CAD/CAM and process control. CRIS also has to adjust to the need for greater flexibility to keep pace with changing technology.

Though the bulk of the activities are being handled by CRIS, on a project-to-project basis the organisation does take the help of professionals from TCS, Wipro, IBM and HP.

That IT has become an integral part of CRIS can be seen from the various initiatives that the body plans to take in the coming years. The total IT budget of CRIS for the year 2006-07 is Rs 350 crore, where the focus will be on upgrading the existing technology and infrastructure, and implementing newer tools and techniques for building IT infrastructure.

Business tool

With India becoming an IT hub, it was natural for the PSUs and government to sit up and take notice. Agrees Ramakrishnan, “It is a paradigm shift for Indian Railways, with the thrust given to building, sustaining and improving IT infrastructure. Earlier, IT was only a management tool... now it is evolving into a good business process tool.”

Ramakrishnan believes that this change was bound to come about with the growing competition from the rest of the transport industry. The Indian Railways understood this competitive market scenario too. “Thus, to continue our leadership position in the market, we needed to have a flexible business process for which the customers’ confidence was essential. The best way to achieve this was through IT.”

Describing the present focus of CRIS, Ramakrishnan states, “We are aggressively building business process applications through IT tools and techniques.”

Smart cards in the offing

There are several plans and schemes that CRIS has for enhancing the railway experience. One such new initiative is issuing smart cards and deploying kiosks for ticketing.

Talking about these initiatives Ramakrishnan says, “We want to create a customer loyalty programme. We plan to introduce smart cards for passengers who travel frequently via Indian Railways. With these smart cards, customers can buy tickets at kiosks. We are confident of starting the first phase of the smart cards project within this fiscal year.”

The first phase of the smart cards project will cover around 200 locations including metros. The budget for the first phase is between Rs 6 crore to Rs 7 crore for 2006.

RFID for wagon and consignment racking

Indian Railways is not only the nation’s preferred means of transport, but it is also the biggest freight and courier transporter. It plans to use RFID for tracking wagons and consignments. This would also help the user to know whether their consignments have actually reached. For the pilot phase of this RFID technology, the budget is between Rs 2 crore to Rs 3 crore.

In wagon fleet tracking, CRIS plans to have an RFID chip-embedded in all wagons and provide sheds that would read these chips and register data. After the implementation, the details can be fed into the Indian Railways’ freight operating information system to help track wagons accurately.

Ramakrishnan explains further. “We are going to start a pilot project of the integrated information system using RFID technology. In our existing infrastructure, we have data loggers who receive the information of any train that passes a station. These loggers then send that information to the divisional control office.”

What CRIS has done is integrate all this information process through RFID technology. With this technology, the customer and railway official will both be aware of train movements. “We have also planned to display this information in the coaches of that particular train as well, so that the passengers will also benefit from the technology,” he adds.

Multi-faceted potential

On CRIS’ competencies and potential, Ramakrishnan comments, “CRIS has a large pool of experienced and competent professionals with expertise in the entire range of engineering functions delivering turnkey solutions 24x7.”

More than just doing engineering work, CRIS also offers services which include consultancy and project management for system analysis and design; solutions architecture; IT infrastructure including networks and data centres; TCO analysis for technology evaluations; server and storage sizing, installation and commissioning; operation support and maintenance; channelling product licencing/OE spares; migration/re-engineering of legacy systems; business intelligence; data warehousing and disaster recovery.

CRIS has also established a countrywide communication infrastructure for Indian Railways. The centre also provides onsite and offsite training in development and management of information system.

Getting better

Ramakrishnan concludes by saying that his team will continue to strive for better and faster results for Indian Railways and its customers. “We are happy to see ourselves in this position, but with a slight change in our focus, we will sustain our leadership in the Indian travel and transport sector.”

faiz@expresscomputeronline.com