Look whose helping the Indian Railways to get back in shape

Indian Railways is riding high on the wave of multiple technology initiatives launched jointly with private firms.

The public-private initiatives such as cash-on-delivery of train tickets, en route pizza delivery and live streaming of media content through WiFi services are fast transforming the 160-year old transporter's customer interface landscape.

These initiatives might have no direct and large revenue implications for railways but help improve quality of service manifold.

BookMyTrain is one such initiative backed by Anduril Technologies, where the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corp (IRCTC) has partnered with the private tech and logistics company to introduce cash-on-delivery on railway tickets for the first time.

The alliance serves over 2,700 pin codes in 168 cities and the reach is growing.

"We are currently enabling 8,000 transactions every month through the BookMyTrain platform and it is expected to rise to 10,000 transactions per day by the end of this year."

"The universe (market for rail tickets) is huge and abound with opportunities," said Anurag Bajpai, director and co-founder BookMyTrain.com.

BookMyTrain charges the customer Rs 40 for delivering a sleeper class ticket and Rs 60 per ticket for AC class.

This is above Rs 20 charged by IRCTC for a non-AC ticket and Rs 40 per AC ticket booking.

"We had started operations in February 2015 with a seed funding of half-a-million dollars and are now exploring options to raise more funds," Bajpai said, adding many more such partnerships between private firms and railways, targeting the huge demand in the railways sector are likely to come up in future.

In another such initiative, IRCTC has tied up with Jubilant Food Works, the parent company of fast food chain Dominos, for delivery of pizzas en route to rail travellers.

The facility, under which orders can be booked online or through text messages, was started in February starting with 12 stations and is planned to be expanded soon.

Earlier this year, IRCTC, India's largest e-commerce player in the travel space, also tied up with BlaBlaCar to offer inter-city ride-sharing service.

Under the partnership, BlaBlaCar can advertise its ride-sharing services to IRCTC website users looking to book tickets for their city-to-city journeys.

The service is useful for travellers who do not have confirmed train tickets and are seeking for last-minute travel solutions.

The partnership is a first of its kind in India as BlaBlaCar allows users to choose co-travellers in a member community with declared identities and peer-to-peer ratings.

At BlaBlaCar, the price per co-traveller is limited to a partial contribution towards the cost of the journey and prohibits the car-owner from making a profit from the trip.

The platform makes a per-passenger transparent distance-based cost recommendation for every journey.

In another example of the rising role of private firms in improving customer amenities, RailTel, a PSU under the rail ministry, has tied up with media group Eros International for providing entertainment services to passengers.

Under the tie-up, Eros Now's video streaming services will be available on RailTel's broadband.

RailTel has launched a high-speed Wi-Fi network on key railway stations and passengers will be informed about this exclusive service on arrival at stations.