Union Railways Minister Piyush Goyal on September 6 while addressing a seminar on leveraging information technology for mobility in Delhi said that Indian Railways has taken Wi-Fi to 710 railway stations, while claiming that it is the best in the country in terms of speed.
During his address union minister also highlighted the exponential growth in paperless ticketing and added that Paperless Unreserved Tickets have moved up from 195 in 2014-15 to 67,000 in 2017 that is a 35,000 percent increase over a period of three years.
During the address he also emphasized the significance of technology for the Indian Railways, and termed ‘Technology’ as the defining factor that will help Indian railways change both its direction and its face in the future.
“GPS is a tried and tested method. It will help us completely eliminate the fudging of data on train movement and help us track the 22,000 trains, both passenger and freight, on a real-time basis. In railways, there are 444,000 tenders. The multiplicity of tenders will lead to cost inefficiency. Hence, the clubbing of items and data mining could help reduce procurement inefficiency. 150 thousand crores of procurement is truly quite a large procurement and if we can look at an initial saving of 15-20 percent that in my standard is the least that we can save,” union minister said.
Goyal further added “A rapid scale-up of technology is what the nation expects out of us, and that’s where we can take the help of the private sector in helping us develop and use that technology.”
Talking about the transformations in the sector he said, “There are so many new transformations that the railways are working on related to the tracks, safety, signalling, catering, punctuality, and modernizing our inspection processes which will make them more efficient and clinically sound.”
