Mamta Banerjee- Railway Minister
MR@rb.railnet.gov.in

Gautam Sanyal- OSD to Mamta Banerjee
Tel 11-23388402
OSDMR@rb.railnet.gov.in

J.K Saha – Executive Director Public Grievances
Tel 11-2338-7871
jksaha78@yahoo.com

Sowmya Raghavan – Finance Commisioner
FC@rb.railnet.gov.in

Vivek Sahai- Chairman Railway Board
Tel 11-23382753
CRB@rb.railnet.gov.in

Rakesh Chopra- Member Engineering
ME@rb.railnet.gov.in

There is an age old saying “prepare for the worst so you won’t be surprised or shocked”. I guess as innocent rail passengers we should n’t be preparing for the worst scenario every day or every month, this is crazy. Assuring passenger safety is the duty of railways. Since last 14 months we Indians have witnessed 14 months, that’s the track record. Unfortunately not worth bragging about. It’s shame that neither mam Banerjee nor Commisioner of Rail Safety has learned from the past rail accidents. When will our Railway officials learn from the past accidents. Recent accident that occured in West Bengal is another one to the major list.

According to Rail Industry experts, Insurance Claims or rescue operations in the last 14 rail accidents have costed Indian Government over Rupees 400 crores on a conservative estimate, this money could have been utilized to pay for modernization and upgrade efforts

a) Train Protection & Warning Systems: Prevents train collisions
b) Training of Locomotive Drivers: Educating and hiring highly skilled & experienced loco drivers
c) Proper Design, Testing, Verification and Validation of Signaling Plans, Table Control Generations, Electronic & Relay Applications
d) Planning for GSM-R: Better and faster communications between control rooms and train loco drivers

I hope railways officials are listening….

China has become an increasingly important global partner in railroad, thanks to an enormous invetsment plan in recent years to upgrade and expand its own rail sector.
- China is sending next month 400 engineers to California to build high speed rail network
- CHina is also investing $2.5 Billion in construction of rail lines, equipment in rail innovation project

Issues and Opportunities
1. People in the Railway Staff College and IRISET Signaling Institute, Secuendrabad should get serious and start preparing student in new technologies, develop strong engineering talent and supply talent not only for our internal utilisation for outside world too. Shri C.P Verma- Director General of Railway Staff College is wasting precious time, resource and lacks expertise to run Railway Staff College. Also R. L Gupta, Director IRISET is blindly following age old teaching practices, lacks global perspective what is going in Europe and America. We are missing lot of action and opportunities.Ministry of Indian Railways should consider alternate options and take serious action in this regard. The solution is to put IIT Professor who has Phd and strong academic experience in teaching and engineering connections.

2. There is huge opportunities to export our engineerign talent from Indian Railways to Central America, Africa and South East Asia. Ministry of Indian Railways should take some concrete actions otherwise it will be too late.

In fact, a closer examination of the railways under Mamta Banerjee will reveal that there has been very little internal technological progress in the past five years. This is because Mamta BAnerjee has invested very little in high technology or advanced training for railways engineers and managers. India’s railway education institutes are wedded to an utterly outdated curriculum. In the railways education faculties, there are virtually no PhDs, and just a handful of post-graduates. There are no research facilities where top railway scientists and engineers can engage in cutting edge research on aspects such as new materials, new suspension systems, machines that can speed up track-laying, track-testing and maintenance.

When it comes to signalling systems, much of India’s network still remains obsolete. Old signalling systems are being replaced at a snail’s pace; and only after enormous presure did Mamta announce a project to modernize toilet waste disposal.

Every small technological upgrade in the railways takes years to implement, and it invariably involves expensive private contractors (often multinationals). Given that the Indian railways transports roughly 20 million passengers each day, one would think that it could afford to invest in at least one IIT-standard university geared exclusively towards research and advanced training for all forms of mass transit. But Mamta has never displayed that sort of farsightedness or advanced vision.

It’s a shame that Commision of Railway Safety has still not published the finding and recommendation of the train collisions that occured in UP, Bihar on the website at least. Why is the Ministry of Railway quiet on this subject. Is the human lives cheap.
1. Is n’t Commission of Railway Safety suppose to enforce or audit periodically the process and safety critical assets of railways and publish the findings about the gaps in railway safety?

2. Taxpayers / Passengers deserve to know which zonal railways are weak in safety matters.

3. What a shame that after 2007 not a single recommendation and audit pertaining to train accidents has been posted on their website. There have been several dozen major accidents since 2007 http://civilaviation.nic.in/ccrs/accidents/Foreword.htm

4. There should be a “Wall of Shame” that publishes the name of the officers who are found to be negligient of their duties and have put passengers at risk. This will serve strong message to officers who take passenger safety and put precious human lives at risk.
Indian Rail Passengers deserve proper response from Rail Authorities. Otherwise Office of Commission of Railway Safety should cease to exist.

To fill the knowledge and talent shortage, Railway Staff College needs to market Track Engineering, Electrification, Signaling Design courses to universities and colleages nationwide. As you are aware that On board signaling equipments are getting sophisticated. We need to do thorough job of preparing our workforce for demanding requirements. I hope you will support my ideas.
New technologies adapted for the on-board control systems have inputs from leading edge expertise in the fields of software, hardware and communications;however the current employees ts involved may not have the adequate understanding on signalling and operation.
Railway Staff College and IRISET need to take proactive role in ramping up the job oriented courses in Track Engineering, Signaling Design and implementation aspects rapidly. Here are some example of the companies that are offering courses, we understand IR too offers only basic and some intermediate courses but Railway Staff College and IRISET needs to do better job of reaching to schools, colleges and private sector to market the courses and stay on top of the latest technologies.

http://www.signet-solutions.com/irse-licencing/
http://www.railtech.co.uk/open-course-programme/

Railway board, IRISET and Railway Staff College should join hands and solve the talent shortage by recruiting top notch trainers/ Professors from IIT train them in Europe on latest technologies and develop high quality courseware and teaching materials. Later these course can then be marketed to REC and other Engineering Colleges.

General impression of the public is Railway Staff College/ IRISET is both the institutions are not doing much to develop the future pipeline of trained manpower. Look at China it is sending 350 engineers next month to California for building sophisticated High Speed Rail Network. Indian Railway should develop a comprehensive workforce strategy to address not just local needs but alo international needs.

Railway Staff College and IRISET should be asked to act immediately. Jai Bharat!!!