Wednesday, June 03, 2026 | 11:36 PM ISTहिंदी में पढें
Business Standard
Notification Icon
userprofile IconSearch

IRCTC turns to AI-powered monitoring to improve train food hygiene

The AI setup is part of the newly established War Room at IRCTC's Delhi headquarters, and is aimed at fostering predictive interventions, according to Chairman and Managing Director Sanjay Kumar Jain

Indian Railways cancelled 161 trains on Tuesday, September 6.
premium

The AI-enabled system detects nine types of errors in the kitchens that are primarily responsible for unhygienic food in trains

Dhruvaksh Saha New Delhi

Listen to This Article

In a bid to solve a legacy hygiene issue in on-board meals on trains, state-owned Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) is deploying artificial intelligence-based (AI) camera surveillance in over 800 kitchens across India, a top company executive said on Wednesday.
 
The AI setup is part of the newly established War Room at IRCTC’s Delhi headquarters, and is aimed at fostering predictive interventions, according to Chairman and Managing Director Sanjay Kumar Jain.
 
Executives at the war room said that the facility, featuring multiple live feeds of all kitchens, has a 24/7 monitoring system, with teams of four or more working in shifts. The monitoring is done through a single dashboard.
 
The AI-enabled system detects nine types of errors in the kitchens that are primarily responsible for unhygienic food in trains. These are hairnet compliance, transparent gloves detection, mopping, wiping, rodent, flies, cockroach, and headgear.
 
The system detects anomalies like the absence of mandatory chef gear/uniforms and raises automated tickets for immediate contractor correction.
 
Travellers say that despite the premiumisation of railway services through efforts like station modernisation and introduction of Vande Bharat trains, on-board meals often face hygiene issues.
 
The war room creates a unified platform that enables faster response, greater accountability, and proactive prevention of service failures across the railway network. It will enable 24/7 real-time monitoring of passenger complaints and incidents, establishing a single source for operational issues, ensuring clear ownership and time-bound resolution of complaints, and shifting from complaint redressal to complaint prevention through data-driven insights, a company executive said.
 
All complaint and incident signals converge into a centralised dashboard. Key data sources include RailMadad complaints, onboard staff reports, social media platforms, CCTV-based alerts, GPS and train telemetry systems, call center escalations, and emergency helplines.
 
The unified digital dashboard will display train-wise complaint heat maps, incident severity indicators, service level agreement countdown timers, repeat complaint alerts, and performance rankings of zones and divisions.