How Indian Railways can become smarter in 2014

As there is an increased demand for safe, fast, and reliable rail services in India, a combination of information technologies and an array of communications driven techniques is set to further enhance Indian Railways respect in the eyes of Indians.

It is a fact that today the global rail industry is struggling to meet increasing demand for freight and passenger transportation due to lack of optimized use of rail network and inefficient use of rail assets. This is expected to induce rail executives to build rail systems that are smarter.

And as a result, smart railways systems are set to incorporate more efficient transportation technologies and create better benchmarks. Today’s SCADA technologies and Information Technology (IT)-solutions are setting up smart railways infrastructure which are future ready. Experts believe that this trend towards incorporating smart tech rail solutions, applications, and devices and components is further set to intensify in the year 2014.

This whole segment of railways is also creating amazing opportunities for a lot of systems integration services, and cloud services which can be offered by a set of solution providers working in tandem with global IT and communication vendors.

As experts close to the industry firmly believe, there is huge opportunity on providing various types of smart railway solutions such as passenger and freight information system, rail traffic management system, rail operations management system, advance security monitoring system, rail communication and networking system, smart ticketing system, and rail analytics system for a country like India.

And when it comes to Indian region, the major smart rail technology solution providers include Juniper, IBM, Hitachi, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, ABB, Bombardier, GE Transportation, CGI Group Inc., Cisco Systems, and ZTE Corporation among others. Additionally, there are a host of systems integrators such as HCL and TCS which are also catering to the vast technology needs of the Railways.