Indian Railways
Transportation
Information
Systems in Indian
Railways S S Mathur, GM - Corporate Coordination, Cris (Centre for Railway Information Systems), talks about the role that CRIS is playing in bringing the benefits of IT to the Indian Railways
I
n the early 1970s, the idea of tracking freight consignments through the use of computerised tracking applications known as TOPS (Total Operating System) gained widespread popularity. Railroads in USA were the first to use such systems and their use spread to UK and Canada as well. In an audacious move, Indian Railways planned the use of a similar system for itself. After years of research, a system known as TRACS prevalent on the Canadian Railways was found to be compatible with IR’s needs. The system planned for Indian Railways was called FOIS (Freight Operations Information System). In 1986, an autonomous organisation known as the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) was created by the Indian Railways for execution of the FOIS project. This organisation slowly took on the role of the IT arm of the Indian Railways. Recently CRIS celebrated 25 years of its existence.
Enhancing the ticketing experience With the turn of the century came a rush of IT project implementations. The first major project launched came in the year 2000; it was the Internet Querying system for PRS (Passenger Reservation System). Passengers could check their PNR
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IT Architecture of Indian Railways
status on the PRS website. The site continues to be extremely popular with railway passengers. In 2002, the Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) was developed in a record time of 8 months and installed in the Delhi area on 15th August. Prior to the implementation of UTS, unreserved tickets were in the form of small purpose-built cards, specially printed for each origin-destination pair of stations. Disbursing
these tickets was a mammoth exercise, requiring mundane and wasteful effort just to keep the tickets in stock. Passengers faced crowded and chaotic ticket windows, last-minute ticketing glitches, and opaque ticket refund rules. The UTS has eliminated all these bottlenecks by having a centralised database of tickets, which can be bought in advance from any ticket window. The introduction of ATVMs (Automatic Ticket Vend-