Amidst all the privacy uproar over the monetisation of railway passenger data, the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) on Friday informed a Parliamentary committee that it no longer plans to hire a consultant for data tracking of passengers. The e-tender document that surfaced online earlier this month revealed Indian Railways plan to hire a consultant who would review the large data dump of railway passengers and help plan ways to use these data for conducting businesses with various private and government sectors.
According to a PTI report, the IRCTC MD and Chairperson Rajni Hasija informed the Shashi Tharoor-led Parliamentary Standing Committee that it no longer was pursuing the tender. The panel had summoned IRCTC officials over the announcement of tender by IRCTC for the hiring of a consultant for digital data monetisation. “IRCTC has withdrawn the tender in light of the non-approval of the Data Protection Bill,” an official told the panel as per the report.
Indian Railways that holds a large data dump of railway passengers, earlier this month, announced a tender for hiring a consultant for the monetisation of its user data bank. According to the e-document of the tender, IRCTC wanted the consultant to track all the data related to “public facing and vendor applications, websites of all Indian Railways, PSUs & Other Units” and create a roadmap for monetisation of digital data. The passenger data included information like the name, age, contact number, email ID, number of passengers travelling, class of journey, payment mode, IRCTC login ID and password and more. The tracking would have also covered the behavioural data of the passengers like the cities they frequently travel to, frequency of travelling, the class of journey preferred, booking modes and more.
