Tracking system will help serve rail commuters better: Angadi

Union Minister of State for Railways Suresh Angadi on Monday said deployment of 2,600 mobile satellite service (MSS) terminals on locomotives will help Indian Railways serve commuters better by giving real time information about the movement of trains.

"There cannot be a better example for the Make-in-India vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi than MSS terminals where the entire technology has been devised in India.

People can get information about the location of the train on a real time basis due to this technology," he told reporters here.

In the coming years, this system will be introduced in all the trains, Angadi added.

The system is designed and developed by wireless communication and semiconductor solutions company Saankhya Labs in partnership with ISRO and Bharat Electronics Limited.

"The MSS terminals enables satellite-based train tracking system on a real time basis," Parag Naik, CEO and co-founder of Saankhya Labs, said.

These terminals send signals every 30 seconds about its location.It will also help in train traffic management, operational efficiency and accident prevention Naik said.

The MSS enabled Real Time Information System (RTIS) is being executed by the Centre for Railways Information Systems (CRIS) in collaboration with ISRO, the company said in a statement.

As part of Phase-I implementation of RTIS, BEL commissioned the RTIS network deploying over 2,600 MSS terminals on locomotives of Indian Railways, Saankhya Labs said in a statement.

The company is the Satcom Technology partner for BEL in the RTIS project.

The RTIS is primarily used for acquisition of train movement data, including that of arrival, departure and run- through timings at the stations enroute, the company said.

Trains hauled by RTIS enabled locomotives gets tracked and plotted automatically in the Control Office Application (COA) at Central Control Office.

"The end-to-end solution was indigenously designed, developed and manufactured in India, all powered by Saankhya's award winning patented Software Defined Radio (SDR) chipsets," the company said.