Wi-Fi services at 100 stations to be commissioned, 400 more stations in the next 2 years: Minister

NEW DELHI: The Minister of Railways Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu while presenting Railway Budget 2016-17 in Parliament today said that the process has begun to introduce Wi-Fi services at stations especially for youth and business travellers.

He proposed to commission Wi-Fi services at 100 stations this year and at 400 more stations in the next 2 years. He said that Indian Railways is partnering with Google in this endeavour.

This year, an application of Track Management System (TMS) was launched. With this, activities of track inspection, monitoring and maintenance have thus been switched over to an IT platform, and automatic alerts in the form of SMS and e-mails are being generated. Inventory Management module of TMS has resulted in inventory reduction by 27,000 MT resulting in saving of Rs.64 crore and scrap identification of 22,000 MT equivalent to Rs.53 crore.

During 2016-17, this system will be implemented on entire Indian Railways. Indian Railways has developed an application for maintaining centralized land data, and records of all land holdings over Indian Railways have been digitized.

Facilities such as ticketing, grievance redressal, etc. will be integrated into two mobile apps; one dealing with all ticketing issues and the other for receipt and redressal of complaints and suggestions related to all our services.