The late-starter and long forgotten, the RailTel Corporation may get a fresh lease of life under the railway minister Mamata Banerjee. In a move to give a fresh orientation to this arm of the railways in these times of telecom revolution, which was born in 2000, the railway minister announced constitution of a fresh committee under technology expert, Sam Pitroda to suggest innovative methods to utilise the optic fibre network the railways have.

Pitroda was the one who started the first step towards the telecom revolution in the country when the late Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister. Obviously Banerjee has pinned hopes that he would be able to breathe fresh life in RailTel.

The railways have extensive network of optic fibre cable across the country (it currently has over 32,500 km of OFC network and work on an additional 10,000 km is under progress), which runs parallel to the rail network. It has a telecom network and operations of its own.

The RailTel Corporation had projected earnings of Rs 500 crore through leasing of its optic fibre cables to telecom operators way back in 2000 but till date is far from reaching that figure. The corporation posted dismal profits of Rs 40 crore last year on a total revenue of Rs 213.9 crore.

What has pulled RaiTel Corporation back in a sector like telecom, which is booming is that it started late and rather laggardly. By the time it got into selling bandwidth to private telecom operators there was surplus of it as several players had set up OFC network of their own. Secondly, they are still confined to remaining just the ‘carrier of carriers’ or ‘data coolie’ rather than getting into carrying content on its own.

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