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14 | www.travelweekly-asia.com DESTINATION: INDIA Though severely neglected through the years, railways have been a lifeline of India's economy. Now the government of India has committed an investment of $120 billion over five years to upgrade Indian Railways. "There has been no investment in the railways for the last 20-25 years," Minister Suresh Prabhu acknowledged. Funding will include Foreign Direct Investment in coach manufacturing, station development, suburban rail and a high-speed network. Even before the investment kicks in, there is a serious effort to overhaul and upgrade infrastructure and systems, the latest one being a plan for a revamp of 400 railways stations in major cities, pilgrim centres and tourist destinations. And to cope with an increasing number of passengers, the permissible limit of coaches in express trains will be increased from 24 to 26, lifting berth capacity by around 150 on each train.The capacity expansion will concentrate on five trains connecting major metro routes such as Delhi to Mumbai. The biggest boost comes from a panel set up to look at technology for the future. While Indian Railways has been successful in using technology for passenger reservations and freight operations, efforts are afoot to see how cloud, analytics, predictive analysis and geographic information systems can be adopted to reduce complexities, integrate operations and improve efficiencies. A report has focused on revamping current technology along with adoption of the best available technologies like Real Time Data (RTD) using GPS or GIS technology, and using proximity sensors or RFID sensors to track locomotives and wagons. It appears the consumer is finally being considered king. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has been entrusted with obtaining feedback on the quality of services through an interactive voice response (IVR) system randomly launched on mobile phones. Technology initiatives launched with private companies are proving to be winners as far as passenger experience is concerned. They include cash-on-delivery of train tickets for the first time through BookMyTrain, and live streaming of media content through WiFi services. IRCTC has tied up with the parent company of fast food chain, Dominos, for the delivery of pizzas en route to rail travellers. Earlier this year, IRCTC also tied up with BlaBlaCar to offer inter-city ride-sharing services. BlaBlaCar can advertise its ride-sharing services to IRCTC website users looking to book tickets for their city-to-city journeys. "We are currently enabling 8,000 transactions every month through the BookMyTrain platform," said Anurag Bajpai, director and co- founder BookMyTrain.com. The company started operations in February with a seed funding of half a million US dollars. The government's RailTel has tied up with media group Eros International for video streaming services available on RailTel's broadband. RailTel has launched a high- speed WiFi network at key railway stations where passengers will be informed about the service. CATCH THE PIZZA EXPRESS By Neelam Mathews Technology initiatives launched with private companies are proving to be winners as far as passenger experience is concerned.