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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