Indian Railways goes tech savvy with SIMRAN technology

25 June, 2012

Indian railways are upgrading themselves almost daily. Now, in addition to their other services, the provision of getting trains' location and position is available by just an SMS.

INDIAN RAILWAYS is becoming tech-savvy every year. Now, people with the proper Internet access do not have to sweat it out in long lines before the ticket counters to get a reserved ticket. The latest addition to the Internet savvy Indian railways is project SIMRAN or Satellite Imaging Railway Navigation that came into being to make the lives of passengers easy. Although, Indian railways has upgraded themselves but the erratic train timings are a cause of concern to the traveling passengers. Now, the technology, which is the joint effort of IIT Kanpur and Indian Railways, is destined to make life easy for Indian passengers.

The technology gathers real-time train running information system that sees to it that a mobile user can easily get information about the location of the train by simply sending a SMS. As an official of the Indian railways told this citizen journalist , “One has to just type in the code of the train and send the SMS to either 09415139139 or 09664139139 and within 2 seconds the person would be provided the real time information regarding the location of the train.”

He further added that all the trains have not been facilitated with this technology, and for now Mumbai Rajdhani, Howrah Rajdhani, Dibrugarh Rajdhani, Sealdah Duronto and Shatabdi trains for Bhopal, Kanpur and Amritsar have it. However, they plan to extend the services of SIMRAN technology to other trains within 18 months. The project that was started in 2004, as confirmed by an official in IIT Kanpur, is still in its pilot stage but the site simran.in has all the vital information for the designated trains.

While metros and railways are getting more Internet savvy, this information can also be misused by extremists. To this the railways official said, We have started this facility to help the customers and as is it only position and location of the train is known and nothing vital as such is being given out by the authorities - thus, the question of danger from extremist groups does not arise.