Until late last year, a good part of his day would be wasted at railway stations waiting for new assignments, as superiors tried to manually match drivers with trains.
I used to work much beyond scheduled hours because there was no clarity about which driver could take over from me at the next station, he says. All that has changed now. Thanks to a new technology platform, Satvinder has a closer bond with his three-year-old. And his is not an isolated case.
More than 88,000 train crew employed by the Indian Railways are now enjoying the benefits of a new crew management system (CMS), a software that uses biometric identification to allocate crew members to trains.
The system maintains a database of each and every railway engine crew, identifies his skills and specialisation, and does broadbased match-making, assigning his timetable and train much in advance.
In many ways, Indian Railways, with an exclusive budget of over Rs 37,000 crore, is an economy in itself. Every day, its 18,000 trains carry 18 million people nearly the entire population of Sri Lanka across the length and breadth of the worlds seventh largest country by geographical area.
The railways, which is spending some $1.5 billion on upgrading its IT systems in the next two to three years, needed to track its crew effectively to ensure that no one is over-stressed and that work hours were allocated in an orderly manner.
A pilot project for crew management was begun in 2006 by the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), an autonomous body set up by the Railways over two decades ago.
The agency, which started by developing software to manage freight, now has to its credit technology systems for track management and online ticket reservations, helping the railways gain efficiency and become a more customer-friendly organisation.
With differing skills needed to operate trains such as Rajdhani, Shatabdi and normal express engines, or even diesel and electric trains, there was a compelling need to have a grading mechanism.
“Now we can run a search by a crew members name or employee number and see where exactly he is at any given point in time,” says Deepak Sharma, a locomotive inspector in Jhansi who is responsible for assigning schedules to crew members and ensuring that the railway timetable remains sacrosanct.
“There was not a single off-the-shelf software package we could use for solving this challenge,” says Deepak Ganju, general manager at CRIS, who started off by evaluating software packages being used by railway networks in countries ranging from the UK to Argentina.
“Those solutions could not address our specific needs,” he says. Mr Ganjus new customised software, which has been developed in-house, has made the Indian Railways more efficient, cut waiting times for passengers, but more importantly, given people like Satvinder a life.
From a railway lobby at his hometown Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, Satvinder now logs into a computer kiosk before every trip using a biometric scanner. After authentication, it displays information about the train he has been assigned to and at which point he must disembark to ensure that he does not work beyond the stipulated 10 hours.
He also receives a text message generated by the system on his mobile phone a day before his assignment informing him about where to report and the route plan.
“Earlier, we had to do these bookings a few hours before the scheduled departure time. Everything was done manually and we were dependent on crew members to tell us whether they were eligible to travel, leading to massive delays and inefficiencies,” says locomotive inspector Mr Sharma.
With the new system, crew bookings can be made up to 30 minutes before a train’s departure. The software does not allow crew members to log in if they are supposed to be undergoing scheduled training or are medically unfit. After crew members disembark, they log in at the kiosk again and provide inputs about any track abnormality, which is then relayed to incoming crew.
“Above all the operational benefits, this system brings a level of transparency which never existed before,” says Suresh Khanna, a 40-year old locomotive engine driver for goods trains based in Jhansi. “I used to spend hours going from one desk to another seeking details about my rest hour status and mileage I can now spend the same time with my family,” he says.
The system is also expected to help Indian Railways improve its operating ratio from around 75% now to almost 65% by 2010, closer to the less than 60% operational ratio of China Rail. A measure of efficiency, this ratio compares operating expenses to net sales and the smaller the ratio, the better an organisation’s ability to generate profits.
While CRIS was originally sanctioned Rs 38 crore for the project, it completed the assignment at less than Rs 12 crore. The return on investment accrues within the first year itself.
“The younger lot has embraced the system, but some in older age group have limitations,” says S M Rizvi, another locomotive inspector. “Features such as biometric sign-on and multilingual capabilities are helping them adopt the systems.”
The new software system has attracted interest from railway networks overseas which face similar problems. Transnet Freight Rail of South African Railways is now in talks with CRIS to adopt the system.