Right on track

Bound by complex labor laws, the largest employer in the world was desperate to automate the process of monitoring and assigning duties to millions of staffers.

In the darkest hours of August 1, 1999, the Avadh-Assam Express collided with the Brahmaputra Mail in one of the worst rail disasters in India. It killed about 300 people and forced the then railway minister to resign. Inquiries into the accident pinned the blame on human error.

In a whitepaper, the Indian Railways holds human failure accountable for two-thirds of railway accidents. "When an accident occurs, the probability is in 65 percent of such cases, it is on account of staff failures. This ratio has not changed with time, training or technological input," says the paper. In 1999, the number of railway accidents totaled about 400. Fatigue among railway staff is never a reason given for the human error, though it is hard to discount. In its record of what the railways is doing to bring down staff failures, the whitepaper says the organization must reduce 'overwork hours' for train drivers.

That, however, is easier said than done.

But, it was exactly what was needed. Only a crew management system could track the hours crew-members logged, ensure that their duties were handed out evenly and that the entire workforce was employed optimally.

As the second-largest rail network in the world, the Indian Railways runs over 18,000 trains carrying about 18 million passengers (more than the population of Mozambique) -- every single day. To keep this enormous operation chugging, the railways employs 1.4 million employees. Reportedly, the organization is the largest employer in the world.

Its size makes it an easy target for inefficiency. Keeping track of such a large workforce and ensuring that it is being used optimally is hard. In 2003-04, for example, the Indian Railways had an operating ratio of 93 percent (Operating ratio is a measure of a company's efficiency. It compares operating expense to net sales. The smaller the ratio, the better an organization's ability to generate profits.). In railroading, an operating ratio of 80 or below is considered good.

"We were not using our crew optimally. There was a lot of wastage or over-usage of the crew. The first affects performance and the other safety," says R.B. Das, Group GM, FOIS, Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).

This state of affairs was due mainly to the fact that Indian Railways worked with chalk and a blackboard, figuratively speaking. Scheduling and assigning duties to a railway staffer everyday and for every single train was done manually by sending messengers or telephone messages to crew-members asking them to report to work. "After the delivery of the message, they would come and report. This was a painfully long process," says Deepak Ganju, GM, Project III, CRIS.

It was also inefficient. In addition, the odds of doing things like they have always been done were not in their favor. As the network added more trains, the time between each train shortened, exposing the drawbacks -- and dangers -- of a manual system. It was only a matter of time before the increased tempo climaxed in a terrible disaster.