How Railtel used the Covid-19 lockdown to boost Railways digital drive

Covid-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown has turned out to be a boon for the digital initiatives of the Indian Railways and the business of its digital arm Railtel Corporation of India. While the initiative of e-office got a push in the last three months, the usage of the commercial bandwidth of Railtel increased 1.5 times and retail bandwidth by 2.25 times during the same period.

During the last three months, its digital platform called the National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) e-office has raised the number of users to over 100,000. Interestingly, the use of e-office among government officers zoomed with the number of e-files increasing from 130,000 to 405,000 and e-receipts increasing from 450,000 to 1.07 million. respectively, showing the rapid digital shift that the national transporter had done since the end of March.

RailTel Chairman and Managing Director Puneet Chawla said the demand for commercial bandwidth increased by 1.5 times and the growth of bandwidth consumption for retail broadband brand RailWire was also up by 2.25 times during the same period. The company’s video conferencing meetings reportedly zoomed 25 times to 8.6 million man minutes from 334,000 man minutes during the same period. “Almost all our services including video conferencing, internet lease line, broadband services, cloud services and data services saw an increase following the lockdown,” Chawla said.

The company has also restarted work on its key projects like installation of closed-circuit television (CCTV). In the first phase of CCTV installation the plan was to install in 300 stations and Railtel had completed work in 215 stations prior to lockdown. “A week back, we have again restarted the work. During lockdown, we commissioned them at 54 stations from where migrant trains were to start,” he added. On June 25, the company signed a memorandum of understanding with the ministry of Railways to install CCTVs across 6,124 stations. In addition to this, the company has floated a tender for installing CCTVs on 7,020 premium train coaches too. This is seen as an initiative to enhance the safety and security of the passengers travelling over the IR network.

Under the project, all cameras to be provided in station premises will be networked on optical fiber cable and brought to a centralised place (CCTV control room) from where they shall be viewed on multiple LCD monitors by Railways security personnel. The system shall provide high capacity storage devices at stations to store recording of CCTV footage for a defined period.

RailTel is the largest neutral telecom infrastructure provider in the country owning a Pan-India optic fiber network. It has exclusive seamless right of way (ROW) along 67,368 kilo metre of railway track passing through 7349 stations across the country. As on 2019, the size of OFC laid has grown to 51933 RKMs of optical fibre cable.

100,000: total number of e-office users

405,000: Number of e-files

1.07 million: Number of e-reciepts

6,124: Number of stations in which CCTVs will be installed

7,020: Planned number of premium train coaches with CCTVs