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Railway Broadband

Will the real Indian Railways-the cyber-visionary or the astrology-entrapped---please stand up?

Railways: Getting tech-savvy

Track this. You can book rail tickets on the internet now. Or at least there's a website which offers to do precisely that.

That, in itself, is progress. And if Railways Minister Nitish Kumar gets his way, over 200 railway stations will have cyber-cafes by the time this year is out. New Delhi station already has one.

And if you have a train to catch, that's taken care of too. The Indian Railways is planning to connect its moving coaches to the internet as well, and that too via broadband. This is a major exercise, and involves the laying of some 40,000 km of fibre optic cable that will give the Railways more than 600 mbps of bandwidth.

Actual train travellers would not need all of it, so the Railways can use the excess capacity to wire up the countryside-networking the country up exactly the way those metal train tracks did a century ago, putting people in touch like never before. Cyber-tracks, of course, criss-cross locations in a great many more combinations, and are thus exponentially more efficient as networks.

The other big advantage, claims the Railways, is that enhanced communiation-all along the tracks-will make rail transport that much safer. Some of the worst rail accidents in India are the direct result of miscommunication, and it is a shame that this sort of thing should continue in an era of modern communication technologies.

In all, the Indian Railways is trying to send strong signals that it does not suffer from what Ted Levitt called 'marketing myopia'. This is good. The Indian Railways is not in the business of running trains, nor even in the business of transportation (Levitt's original example of focusing on basic needs), but in the business of putting people in touch with one another.

Not bad. Not bad at all. Refreshing thoughts, coming as they are from the Railways. There are some brains hard at work somewhere out there, and that is a terrific sign. But if it all comes to nought, will it be Rahu that's held responsible or Ketu? Or any other stellar conspiracy?

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