Big technological boost for Piyush Goyal-led Indian Railways! Enjoy high speed, uninterrupted internet service at railway stations, as Indian Railways has now equipped as many as 5,628 railway stations on the network with free WiFi facility. RailTel, under Indian Railways, has been providing free high-speed WiFi at several stations in a tie-up with various entities like Department of Telecom, Tatas, and Google. Along with this, in a big technology boost to passenger safety and security, CCTV surveillance cameras have been installed at 522 railway stations.
Recently, in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal stated that the real time information system or RTIS has been implemented in 2,700 locomotives. He explained that the device fitted in the locomotive sends the updates of the train movement every 30 seconds, along with the location to the RTIS server.
The information is then relayed to the section controller through the control office applications or COA. Around 25 per cent of the total arrival and departure updates in the control charts are now automated, based on the inputs received from the RTIS server. The Minister added that the radio frequency identification or the RFID tagging was done in more than 20,000 wagons as well as 2,000 coaches. This process will help in the automatic and accurate identification of the rolling stock as they move across the Indian Railways network, with a special emphasis on improving safety and reliability. Additionally, the artificial intelligence-based methods were also being utilized in the passenger services to predict the probability of confirmation of the wait-listed tickets.
Meanwhile, it was recently reported that the Indian Railways network has developed one of the world’s largest free public Wi-Fi networks. Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, while presenting Budget 2020 on February 1, 2020, stated that free Wi-Fi facility was commissioned at as many as 550 railway stations within the first 100 days of the Narendra Modi-led government coming to power for the second time. Railtel, a Miniratna public sector undertaking (PSU) under the Ministry of Railways, has been delegated with the task of providing free WiFi facility at Indian Railways stations.