Bengaluru: One of the ambitious technology initiatives of the Indian Railways, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project – expected to bring in radical changes in the railway operations, will allow officials to monitor the movement of trains across the country from one place, said Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu on Wednesday.
He was delivering the inaugural address through video-conferencing of the 24th edition of CII National Quality Summit, organised by the CII Institute of Quality, themed ‘The Digital Transformation of Business – Implications for Quality’, that commenced in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
“IT and digitalisation is the key for development and transformation of the Railways. Integrating various services is expected to bring radical changes in the service delivery,” he said.
“Today, there is a manifold change taking place across the world due to digitalisation. It is a great opportunity for us, as India is well positioned to take advantage of this. With digitalisation, the quality of service will be the same irrespective of who the end user is,” he said.
Speaking specifically on the digital initiatives taken up by the Railway Ministry, he said, “All Railways operations are being moved towards digital. We have developed several elements of change in the way the Railways functions to keep up with the evolving technology. We have put in place a customer complaint redressal mechanism which is completely transformative in nature through which we have been able to provide real-time assistance to the people. We are in the process of developing a system whereby any complaints made through different platforms, like SMS, Twitter, phone etc. are integrated into one. We are also implementing GPS monitoring system for the Railways. Another important area of work in progress is setting up of a public Wi-Fi which will be the largest in the world. The customer will benefit from improvements in quality,” he said. He also stated that ERP is introduced all the activities can be monitored from a centralised cell.
