IRCTC: One Number Dialling

A pleasant surprise awaits you in June 2007 as the Indian

Railways brings you a surprise package. By dialing 139, passengers will be able

to obtain all relevant information needed to plan their journey, making travel

by Indian railways a pleasurable experience. This facility will enable people

located even in remote corners of the country to dial a single number at the

cost of a local call to get information on railway services. For making calls to

139 customer friendly, Hindi, English and regional languages like Marathi,

Telugu, Bangla, Tamil, Gujarati and Kannada would be used to communicate in the

call center, as per the callers choice. Apart from language support, three types

of services-Basic Enquiry Service (BES), Premium Enquiry Services and Value

Added Service (VAS) would be provided to customers.

BES will have all the current information: train position, PNR

status for reservation, availability of reserved accommodation (except tatkal),

fare enquiry and accident related information.

PES will encompass availability of tatkal accommodation, trains

between stations, concession rules, cancellation rules, refund rules, SMS alerts

through IVRS, accommodation fax facility through IVRS, call back facility

through IVRS, time table schedules, detailed journey planning, train

connections, enquiries pertaining to rules of reservation, refund, break and

circular journey, change in name, concessions enquiries pertaining to passenger

amenities and facilities available at stations such as retiring room, cloak

room, Rail Yatri Niwas, alerts for specified services through SMS and much more.

VAS will offer railway ticket reservations, taxi bookings/car

rentals, hotel bookings, and any other product/service introduced by IRCTC.

Spanking Experience



To make this service a reality, IRCTC Indian Railway Catering and Tourism
Corporation has selected Spanco Teleservices to manage Train Enquiry System

across India. Spanco will pay a license fee of Rs 25 lakh per year with an

incremental of Rs 25 lakh per year, for a period of 10 years. They will set up,

operate and maintain IVRS/ASR and Regional Call Center's at their own cost on

behalf of Indian Railway/IRCTC. A setup of 2,000 seats in the call center in the

first phase, is in the pipeline. Spanco has tied up with BSNL, as the service

provider that would carry calls to the call center. As BSNL has a reach in every

nook and corner of the country, people from all walks of life will have access

to services provided by Spanco's call center.

The deal between Spanco and the Railways is based on public

private partnership (PPP) model. Unlike selling seats at a fixed price or

handling calls for fixed rate per call, this model explores a unique way of

addressing some basic needs in a mutually beneficial manner for both the service

originator as well as service operator. Revenues will be generated from revenue

sharing with the telecom operator for all incoming calls i.e. basic and premium,

SMS revenues for various services, commission on tickets, taxis, hotel booking

through the call center, advertising revenues, and any other new service

launched by the Indian railways. Given the huge volume of calls (16,80,000 calls

per day) and over 400 mn commuters per year, the revenues are a direct function

of these volumes. The revenues are expected to be in the range of Rs 800 to Rs

1,000 crore spread over the next 10 years of the contract. The whole business

model is very viable and simply on account of large volume of railway commuters

which in today's context exceed over 40 crore passengers annually.

Spanco, on its part, will set up four regional call centers in

north, east, west and south zones of the country at its own cost. Railways will

provide data centers at railway stations. Spanco will invest over Rs 50 crore in

terms of technology and other infrastructure to operate the service, for capex

on account of technology, obsolescence and infrastructure renewal investment

will be in tune of Rs 2 crore, and the operational expenditure for centers will

be about Rs 30 crore annually. IP based call center technology, interactive

voice response system (IVRS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) will be used

for the setup. Nortel would be providing these technologies as well as take care

of equipments. IBM would handle software part and Oracle would be used for

handling the database.

The plus point of Spanco railway deal is that apart from the

ticket charges, customers do not have to pay a penny for enjoying hassle free

access to information for planning and making there railway journey. But the

catch is one has to wait till June to be confident that it's not just another

customer friendly initiative only on paper .

Sandeep Budki





sandeepb@cybermedia.co.in