RailTel – Keeping the Network Running during the COVID19 Crisis

The wave of COVID19 pandemic has hit hard and to tackle this disease, the whole country has gone in an unprecedented lockdown to maintain social distancing. However, owing to the nature of work, RailTel, a Miniratna PSU under Ministry of Railways, had to adapt some crucial steps to continue to provide essential service of Telcom infrastructure, Railway communication and home broadband to its client. RailTel handles crucial communication system, video conferencing and implementation of e-office platform as well storing important data for Indian Railways in its two data centres (Gurgaon and Secunderabad). In the current crisis situation, ensuring the availability of essential commodities and associated supply chain is of paramount importance for which Railway freight operations need to be run operated without any hiccups. In such a scenario it is all the more important for keeping the network and data centre operations stable so that it doesn’t hamper the Railway freight movement and communication between all the offices of Indian railways across the country. A large number of Banks are also dependent on RailTel services for their data communications needs.

To run the two data centres and 4 Regional Network Operation Centres and One Central Network Operation Centre, RailTel management has deployed minimal physical workforce of 2-3 employees for whom rosters has been prepared and duties are being set on rotation basis. Special arrangements for Boarding and Lodging have been made either at RailTel premises or at a nearby residential areas close to RailTel offices so that the employees do not need to travel over large distances or use mass transport. Majority of the maintenance work has been shifted to various internal Network
monitoring platform and tools of RailTel and being monitored remotely. Only, skeletal workforce has been deployed on the ground for essential physical maintenance and for exigencies. All the operational centres are being thoroughly sanitized and disinfected and deputed employees are also maintaining all essential personal hygiene so that no contamination happens. The employee while carrying out work are following social distancing at Data Centre, Network Operation Centres and in field. Permissions from local authorities have also been obtained for employees of our partners and support agencies to ensure no disruptions to services.

RailTel was already implementing e-office platform for Indian Railways for enabling paperless office system. Currently 72976 users are enabled to work from home using this platform. The work of e-office implementation has not been hampered by lockdown and 1116 users were registered after lockdown period. Despite resource movement restrictions, RailTel team planned the execution and implementation and user trainingm was done remotely. RailTel has also created Virtual Private Network for 400 users ofm Indian Railways and based on further request the service will be provided.
With majority of the workforce working remotely, the video conferencing service provided by Railtel to Indian Railways has also proved to be very effective. The number nof video meetings has almost doubled during lockdown period for effectively coordinating the freight train operation on war footing.