The Hindu Business Line : Another line to the railways

This time, it's not about railway lines but about Southern Railways' free telephone service. While the technology service provider can rake in revenues, the railway saves Rs 50 lakh in infrastructure investments.

V. Sreenivasa Murthy

WE have heard of companies outsourcing non-core processes to reduce costs and save some money, but how about a case where the client is paid a share of revenue for outsourcing? Strange, but true! And who is this client with the magic contract? Southern Railways.

Southern Railways has outsourced a portion of its critical call centre operation, the 133-Railway public service, which provides train arrival and departure information, to LatticeBridge Infotech Private Limited, a Chennai-based software firm. In the outsourcing model adopted by the Southern Railways, the software company not only provides the `133' service for free to the Railways but also shares revenue earned by the company by playing advertisements while a caller waits for departure and arrival information to be retrieved by the system.

The system typically takes 10-15 seconds to retrieve the requested information, says C. Mohan Ram, Managing Director, LatticeBridge Infotech. The deal also means that the company has to bring in the advertisements and not Southern Railways.

Southern Railway saves Rs 50 lakh on investment in infrastructure and a further 15 per cent of investment every year that would have been spent on maintenance. The call centre handles about 20,000 queries a day with about 25 people working in shifts. This means an additional expenditure of Rs 20 lakh a year for salaries. Apart from these savings, the Southern Railways has a potential to earn a minimum of Rs 1.2 lakh in two years from LatticeBridge as part of the revenue sharing agreement, says Mohan Ram.

Launched about eight months ago, the 133-service uses Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology. It allows a computer to identify the words that a person speaks into a microphone or telephone. On dialling 133 the system greets the passenger and ask for the language. Once the language (English or Tamil) is chosen, simple queries are asked and passengers in their own voice give responses to queries by simply speaking to the system.

The system gives relevant information to user. There are advertisements during the information retrieval period. For the first time in the country, LatticeBridge introduced ASR-based public service for Southern Railways, says Mohan Ram. The company handled an average of 10,000 calls a day for the last six months, he adds.

There are also a few firsts in the Southern Railways' outsourcing deal. For the first time in over 150 years, the Indian Railways has allowed a private company to offer services through the universal 133 number. The number is used for getting arrival and departure information all across India.

Southern Railways' outsourcing initiative is the first on a revenue share model between the Indian Railways and a private company for public services.

Another first is the deployment of Tamil-based ASR — first time in the world too. People who call can get the relevant information by just asking for the train names and they need not remember the train numbers of almost 140 trains in the Chennai division, says a Southern Railways official.

According to Mohan Ram, the Southern Railways is soon planning to launch other public services, including ticket availability and reservation status. Following the success in Southern Railways, other zonal railways are also planning a similar outsourcing model.

raja@thehindu.co.in

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