Technology at the Wheels

When the spirit of 'technology for public good' drives the wheels of the

nation, the lives of common men are bound to change for the better. Truly

implementing this ideal and reaching out to millions of passengers, is the

Indian Railways-the world's second-largest railway network. It carries 11

million passengers everyday in 8520 trains, departing from 7000 stations.

Shorter queues, additional revenues, good RoI and happier customers-all these

did not come without the Railways' vision and the dexterous labour of its IT

arm, Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).

The Ministry of Railways instituted CRIS in 1986 to be an umbrella for all

computer activities going on in the Indian Railways. Mainly project oriented,

CRIS was created as a separate organization because it was considered better

that a separate arm takes over all the computer activities, and also to avoid

duplication of efforts, to ensure IT standardization across them, and to

insulate it from the day to day workings of the railways.

The need for greater flexibility to keep pace with fast changing technology

has kept a team of railway domain experts, tech pros and research specialists at

CRIS on their toes for the development of numerous computer applications. The

first project was to design, develop, and implement the Freight Operations

Information Systems (FOIS). The major milestones: Passenger Reservation System

and the Unreserved Ticketing System, which have turned the once-not-so-charming

ministry to one of the most advanced ministries in India.

Passenger Reservation System



In the mid-80s, Indian Railways first computerized its reserved ticketing

operations. This was done from five regional passenger reservation centres, each

of which was a stand-alone site with its own local database. Though efficient,

it could not provide one-window ticketing. Rajesh Narang, chief system manager,

Passenger Reservation System (PRS) says, "It was then that CRIS stepped in

to make a new in-house software. In 1994, we decided that the earlier used PRS

had to be rewritten for a distributed work environment, which would exploit the

client server paradigm."

Two and a half years and a million lines of code later, a mission critical

software for networking the PRS-Countrywide Networking Computerized Enhanced

Reservation and Ticketing (CONCERT)-was deployed in Secundrabad. On Sept 9,

1996, a two-way handshake between Secundrabad and Delhi, set the ball rolling

for the one-window ticketing system which the nation enjoys today. The most

difficult part was the migration of the 60-day advance booking records (9 lakh

records) from the old system to the new. Finally, on April 18, 1999, with the

networking of Chennai PRS and all-major metropolitan cities and Secundrabad

completed, the 'anywhere to anywhere' reserved ticketing has become a

possibility on any PRS booking terminal.

The IRCTC angle



In 2000, when the Web wave came in a big way, CRIS developed and deployed

the Indian Railway's Web site www.indianrail.gov.in.

On February 28, 2000, all common enquiries like trains between a given pair of

stations, reservation availability, PNR status, fares, train schedules and

station codes were made available to the common public through the Internet.

Shashi Bhushan Roy, group GM, PRS remarks, "Within a very short span of

time this site has become one of the most popular Web sites in India, with daily

hits to the order of 40 lakh. Our new sites www.trainenquiry.co.in

and www.indianrail.gov.in are both

hosted by CRIS and are updated every half an hour."

The IRCTC system was developed on the BroadVision suite of e-commerce

platform. According to Narang, "The futuristic vision with which PRS was

built used a scalable bus architecture that allowed us to build a Web layer

around it. We had to define virtual terminals to ensure necessary accounting

between the Internet user and the railway reservation system." IRCTC passes

the booking details to CRIS, which, then, on the basis of virtual terminals,

decides the point of transaction after which the packet IDs are forwarded to one

of the five booking zones.

"The CRIS and IRCTC sites are banded together to make the full

availability of disintegrated information available on demand," says Deepak

Chhabra, general manager, PRS. "Our receptiveness to the public's

feedback is what propels the change in our systems. We have gone another step by

making train inquiry available through mobile phones via SMS."

Unreserved Ticketing System



The Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS), CRIS' most recent milestone, was

inaugurated in August 2002. Implemented by Rajesh Narang, this system turned

things around for millions of unreserved travelers and for the management as

well. It also got Narang the Computerworld Honors Laureate award for visionary

use of IT in transportation. He comments, "We replaced the earlier heavily

manual ticketing system with a new three-tier application-the first tier is

the Indian Railways central server, the second consists of the Zone Headquarters

and Station Servers, and the third the dumb terminals and thin-client machines

at the ticket generation points. Based on current standards, and using leading

edge hardware, data management and network technology, Indian Railways has been

able to produce a more efficient and cost-effective ticketing system."

Given the 16 zones of the Indian Railways, the task of getting all the

distributed systems in place was mammoth. Of the 16 zones, four have been

brought under the UTS and the next phase would see its implementation in 2000

more counters at five more zones. The system has a failover and failback

capability to ensure continued ticketing operations in the event of hardware or

network outage that interrupts the connection between the server and the point

of sale. Unlike PRS, which is a 12-hour runner, UTS is up and running 24x7.

"Therefore, we had to increase its sensitivity to failures. Very recently,

when the servers at Kolkata went down for 5 hours, the systems were directly

logged on to the Patna server to ensure business continuity," says Narang.

CRIS has come a long way and has to go still further. So what is it that

keeps the Railways on the IT track? As Shashi Bhushan Roy, sums it up: "We

are a team of tech savvy professionals and railway domain experts with a common

resolution. As demand augments, supply has to be met proportionally, and in the

end, it is the best system which comes to the service of society, when needs and

technology marry."

Jasmine Kaur