Indian Railways goes paperless! RailTel has successfully completed the implementation of phase-I of the NIC e-Office suite. Now, a total of 58 establishments of Indian Railways are adopting paperless work culture. As of 30 October 2019, RailTel has created over 50,000 users in these 58 establishments of the national transporter and also trained executives to handle the platform. In March 2019, RailTel signed the MoU with Indian Railways for the Phase 1 with a mandate to complete the work by March 2020. The PSU, which is one of the largest neutral telecom services providers in the country, completed the work ahead of time.
Implementation of e-Office is a Mission Mode Project (MMP) under the Modi government’s National e-Governance Programme. Developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC), NIC e-Office is a cloud-enabled software that is being deployed or hosted from RailTel Tier III certified data centres at Gurgaon and Secundrabad. According to details shared by RailTel, it is based on the Central Secretariat Manual of e-Office Procedure.
At present, 4 modules- File Management System, Collaboration and Messaging Services, Personnel Information Management System, Knowledge Management System are part of the e-Office system being implemented.
The purpose behind the implementation of e-Office for India’s largest public transporter is to provide an efficient, effective and reliable way to handle office documents and files. According to RailTel, the system ensures complete transparency as anything written on the file once cannot be changed or undone. Also, there is a monitoring mechanism to see where the files are held up.
Some of the other immediate advantages of NIC e-Office include quick disposal of files as well as systematic, timely monitoring of pending files. With these advantages, the national transporter will be changing the work culture for providing better services to the public. The project facilitates paperless culture which will help to save operational cost and will also reduce carbon foot print.