ISSUES AFFECTING COMPUTERIZATION OF THE INDIAN RAILWAYS by U.S.Jha IRTS M.Phil PGPPM

ISSUES AFFECTING COMPUTERIZATION OF THE

INDIAN RAILWAYS

The Indian Railway is one of the pioneers of the computerization in India. In 1980s when computer was accepted as a proven technology in the developed countries, there was very less utilization of computer in India. There was lots of apprehension against computerization and there was also some opposition against computerization as people particularly different trade unions were believing that computer will replace the manpower, whereas, their apprehensions have no relationship with reality, the lead taken by the Indian Railways helped in removing these misgiving. The IR initiated a bold step and initiated ‘Passenger Reservation System (PRS)’ to book the reserved accommodation in passenger coaches of various classes. As the time has proven the PRS system become most visible and successful model of computerization in India. Another milestone in this was achieved in the second half of the first decade of 21^st century when PRS ticket was gradually made available through courier and then through e-ticket. In 2008 the site of IRCTC became most often visited site of the world. Thus computerization oof passenger reservation system become most successful mode of computerization in India. It was expected that similar level of computerization would be reflected in other fields of Railways activities. However, after thirty years of grand start, it is being felt that such replication has not taken place in other areas of Railway. Although there are several reasons for this kind of poor utilization, there are certain subtle issues which are deeply affecting the performance, or, rather poor adoption of computerization in other areas. Some of the more important issues have been discussed hereunder:-

I Change the Information Technology Governance of Railways

Peter Weill after studying 256 enterprises in 23 countries in America, Europe and Asia –Pacific reached to the conclusion that top performing enterprises proactively seek value from IT (Information Technology) in at least five ways:

1. They clarify business strategies and the role IT (Information Technology) plays in achieving them,
2. They measure and manage the amount spent and the value received.
3. They design organizational practices to fit IT to their business strategies.
4. They assign accountability for the organizational changes required to benefit from new IT capabilities.
5. They learn from each implementation, becoming more adept at sharing and reusing IT assets.

Since Railways was one of the pioneers of computerization, hence it has tried to adapt these principles in a successful manner. However to say that every thing is perfect would be overstatement. In fact the above five issues are to be evaluated regularly and monitored for proper implementation as a continuous process. Appropriate IT governance for Indian Railways would be basically the process by which the organization align IT actions with their goals and objectives. This involves establishing input rights (who gives the proper input), decision rights (who decides what is appropriate) and an accountability framework (who is responsible for what) for encouraging desirable behavior and actions in the deployment and use of IT. The desirable behavior is the behavior, which is consistent with the mission, strategy, values, norms and culture of the organization. The success or efficacy of IT governance lies in tapping the IT potential of people in the enterprise and putting it to an effective use for furtherance of overall corporate vision.

It may be noted that IT governance is not concerned with day to day activities or what specific decisions are made but it is the broader issues or basic framework to systematically decide who will take decisions on issues like IT Principles, IT Architecture, IT Infrastructure strategies, Business Application Needs and IT Investment and Prioritization, who will give inputs required for taking these decisions and who will be ultimately responsible and accountable for these decisions. As per the Weill’s paper, organization uses six basic governance archetypes (Business Monarchy, IT Monarchy, Feudal, Federal, IT Duopoly and Anarchy) for taking (decision rights and input rights) the above five major IT decisions. The objective of the IT governance is to align IT with the business and delivers value and to ensure that IT resources are properly allocated its risks are mitigated.

In present scenario Railways have to further adjust its IT governance;-

Matching with Corporate Goal

“Punctuality, Safety and Speed” is Railways’ corporate goal and to achieve this Computerization has not been taken as a helping tool. By adopting computerization Railways can achieve major improvement.

Better Governance

Barring PRS Railways still works with red tap file, which is a major source of corruption and slow speed. Almost all departments need total computerization to improve its productivity of its manpower and better governance. And this would be a big decision, which can be taken only at top level.

For better output the mapping of the above five major decisions (decision rights) with the five governance groups is given below: -

IT decisions	Current Practice	Proposed
IT Principles	Monarchy prevails as major policy decisions are taken at the Railway Board level.	IT Duopoly or federal model could be a better alternative
IT Architecture	Monarchy prevails as how things would work is decided at the Railway Board level.	IT Duopoly or federal model could be a better alternative
IT Infrastructure	Presently decision regarding manpower are taken at the top level	Federalism could be a better alternative.
Business Application Needs	In absence of inter connectedness anarchy prevails as every individual user decide its application.	Federal Model (CIO, IT Executives and senior officers at field formations should jointly taking the decision for efficient application)
IT Investment and prioritization	Monarchy prevails as decisions are taken at the Railway Board level	IT Duopoly (CIO and other top level officers) and federalism would give better result.

II) Symbolic Exercise of Power by IT Professionals of Railways

As per Markus and Neils IT professionals exercise certain powers on the users that is attributed to their knowledge. The users usually do not have access to such expertise and knowledge base and hence are not in a position to challenge. They further presented two dimensional frame work of such power exercise based on context and target which give rise to four types of power exercise amongst which symbolic exercise is one. The key elements of such power exercise are:

· Symbolic exercise of power is done by shaping individual’s desire and value beyond the context of the Information Service project.

· The IT professionals use Information Service projects with certain engrained ideals

A blatant example of such symbolic power is the belief prevalent amongst users that IT has panacea for all problems or ICT will lead to developed society. Idea of computerization is never resisted, as it is perceived to be symbol of progress.

Such power exercise has been experienced at several occasions both from professionals within and outside the organization. Some such examples from of recent experiences are:

· Structural power exercise:

This kind of power exercise by creating organizational structure is common in many government departments. But it seems that it is deep rooted in the Railways:

1. In the Railways every divisional units have a centralized computer centre called EDP (Electronic Date Processing) centre. The in charge of EDP centre is called EDP manager. All computerization proposals, all specifications regarding purchase of computers are supposed to be technically vetted by his cell before putting up to the higher authority for approval.

2. Computers are treated as a specialized kind of office machines and are in the purview of several ifs and buts. Spares and other hardware requirement up to a certain value have been permitted to be purchased. Beyond that it has to go to the Deputy General Manager -General (DGM (G).

3. Laptops were sanctioned to all officers in Junior Administrative Grade JAG). An option was asked for the specification of laptop on a prescribed proforma but ultimately totally different specification was purchased. Claimed by the think tank of IT department of Railways as giving us the best stuff they have purchased window vista, which many users find not so friendly.

· Symbolic exercise of power: IT will bring transparency:

1. Downloadable tender document forms: There has been recent step by which all contractors can directly download tender forms in both languages from the official website of The Railway. The harassment faced by contractors wherein they were refused such tender forms was the main reason for implementing this. But this doesn’t change much as small contracts and quotations are not unloaded on the system.

2. Electronic Clearing System of contractual bills: Recently introduced system to bring transparency in clearance of contractor’s bills. There has been complaints that the after the passing of bills the cheque are not handed over or dispatched to the contractors by the un scrupulous bill clerks. This has only shifted the centre of corruption from cheque collection point to bill receipt point.

· IT will revolutionize government working system:

Large-scale computerization initiative has been taken in many government departments and Railways is no different. The major euphoria behind the whole exercise has been increasing efficiency and reducing corruption. But has it really changed the efficiency level substantially? The basic bureaucratic way of functioning and red tapes of the system continues. In most offices the computers are merely used as typing machines and office staff would be found playing computer games. Software has been developed for tracking important files and letters. However, this has not been used effectively as most of the time it is not updated due to lethargy of the clerical staff. Unless complete transformation in form of organization, processes and people takes place, such visible changes in performance cannot happen by mere computerization. But it is the symbolic power that IT professional exercise upon the general people that tend to foster this belief that IT can bring about transformation in bureaucratic style of functioning.

Mistakes in Software Development

Although Indian Railways is one of the pioneers in the development of computerizations of public sphere, it has its moment of sweet and sour. In many cases it has been able to mark remarkable achievement, whereas in some cases lady luck has not met it and has remained deprived of sweet success as seen in the case of “Development of Crew Management System” (CMS). To streamline the problems of crew management a proposal was mooted in 2004 –05 to develop a CMS software. The proposal was approved in 2005-06 and it was expected that the project would be completed within a year at a cost of approximate Rs.10 crore. Originally in 2005-06 the allotment of 8.95 crores was made but after several revision it has already reached to Rs. 38.16 crores (2006-07) whereas it is still in trial stage. This shows that unrealistic planning has been made.

Reasons for non-taking off of the pilot phase were: -Hardware were not fully installed by CRIS/Vendor which indicated lack of effective project sponsorship. b) Server timed out repeatedly. Networking reliability test yet to be done by CRIS. This indicates wasting time during fuzzy front end c) Only freight and shunting modules have been tested in lab and are under trial in field at 2 lobbies, but have to get stabilized. This indicates inadequate design. d) Issue of integration of different technologies like WED, Biometric etc. is yet to be resolved by CRIS. This indicates omitting necessary task from estimate. e) Software is not yet ready in all respects for physical roll out. This is leading to code like hell programming. f) Different Guard lobbies, Driver lobbies and crew changing points proposed by Railways are yet to be integrated. Even basic infrastructure facilities like furniture, electricity facilities etc. have not been provided as these are being provided by some other agency.

Thus in the beginning itself very unrealistic target of one year was set. Such target was bound to fail and it happened so. Some attempt was also made to implement it, on the basis of whatever has been prepared. However it has not succeeded and the CMS is yet in pilot phase Probably the railways have understood that there is never enough time to do it right but there is always time to do it over.

Free/Open Source Software

Traditionally Indian Railways, which have been pioneer of computerization of public sphere, have used proprietary software. Indian Railways use to be one of the important sources of earning for proprietary software selling firms. The basic data of public reservation system (PRS) is being maintained in these software .The time has come when we should shift in place of UNIX operating system, LINUX system which is a Open Source Software (OSS). Similarly in railway reservation system, MySQL can be used in place of ORACLE. These two steps may lead to great revenue savings for the Railways.

Although Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation Ltd (IRCTC) which is a subsidiary of the Ministry of Railways and cater to 13 million passengers every day decided to adopt Oracle e-Business Suite to run on Red Hat Linux, the Ministry of Railways has not taken a conscious decision to replace proprietary software with OSS. In February 2007, e ticketing was made open for the entire country. E-tickets are now being issued through e-seva of state governments, post offices, petrol pumps, and ATMs. A common enquiry number was also introduced in mid 2007 in which by dialing the telephone number 139, passengers are able to obtain information about arrival and departure of trains, seat availability, etc, at local call rates from any part of the country. The Railways is also planning to start state-of-the-art technologies in railway automation, safety, fault repair, and monitoring of rail network through Global Positioning System (GPS) in near future. Despite availability of OSS and all these are not being done on OSS.

Recently the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) of Indian Railways plans to use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to improve the wagon management system of the Railways. CRIS proposes to have a RFID tag or chip embedded in all the wagons and provides sheds with handheld devices that would read these chips and thus register the data. Following this, the details can be fed into the Indian Railways system to help track wagons accurately. A pilot project is being run in the East Coast Railways. In absence of any clear policy guideline these innovations are not being done with the help of OSS, rather these are being adopted in bits and pieces and proprietary software still dominates.

Besides these every Railways office is having a large number of PC for day-to-day working. But most of these offices are still using proprietary software as general awareness among the common staff about OSS particularly their application like Apache (web server); My SQL (structured database); OpenOffice (office suite); Firefox (web browser); WordPress (weblog) is very low. As most of the schools, colleges etc were teaching about Windows only, there is some amount of resistance among the staff to adopt relatively new application. Hence the railways is yet to derive full benefit of Novell SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, Ubuntu Linux, NetBSD, KDE Desktop OpenOffice, Firefox, GIMP, Moodle and Nvu fully. Probably the Indian Railway needs awareness at the level of managers to derive the benefit of OSS.

Let us examine what could be possible challenges for such adoption.

Migration cost: - The Railways have also not pursued it strongly as shifting to a new system has a migration costs which would be very high due to sheer size of the organization. Due to this it may not be beneficial to migrate.

Training cost: - Training such a large number of staff is a mammoth task .It would require a large sum and huge effort on the part of Railways, which has not been thought by Railways.

Customization cost: - Even OSS needs some amount of customization to meet the specific requirements of Railways. To replace an existing system means a higher cost. This has not been tried yet.

Availability of services: - In proprietary software a system is already in place for all kinds of services including up gradation and meeting the breakdowns. In OSS all these things required to be set afresh which has not been tried yet.

III) Symbolic Exercise of Power in Railways

As per Marcus and Anderson Information System (IS) professionals exert power symbolically by shaping users desires and values outside the context of an individual system development effort. The most important instance of this type of power exercise occurs when user employ the products of system development processes. This type of IS power exercise is directed on user’s value and attitudes like expected benefits from a project. This symbolic exercise of power can occur even in circumstances when both IS professional and user are unaware of the exercise of power. Many people may be even reluctant to consider this type of phenomenon as a type of power exercise because it is so difficult to trace to the behaviors of individuals. Neither users nor IS professionals are aware of four types of powers- technical, structural, conceptual and symbolic exercise either before during or after the acts themselves. Thus professionals may not believe that they are deliberately intending to alter users’ behavior, users could define as contrary to their interests. Rather, professionals may describe their behavior in terms of carrying out the mandate of top management, and users may believe that they have been swayed by technical expertise as opposed to being the victims of a maneuver. This type of exercise of power has the maximum effect as it has the potentiality to change the values of users.

Indian Railways is one of the pioneers of computerization in country. Railways have been major user of computer and its different program. Despite this, Railways is one of the most affected victims of symbolic exercise of power. This begins from the level of Railways Board. First of all, it is the Railway Board, which decides which program, or module is going to be adopted to meet a particular target/work. One may question that the program selected is not the best alternative. Still the users cannot refuse or deny it. Rather, it is accepted because the users never think that persons sitting at the superior position can commit any such mistake.

Procurement of computer hardware is another such area where symbolic exercise of power is being done blatantly. Railways Board has clear-cut guidelines that DGS & D (Director General of Supply and Disposal) approved vendor and brands are to be purchased for the railways use. However, many brands present in the DGS & D lists are of inferior quality and doubtful performance. Still the user has no choice and almost all departments are purchasing such computers. Whereas, in working when we face the problem of inferior computer we don’t have any alternative. Even the warranty provisions are not properly effected as the last end users have most of the time no clue about the suppliers, their address or telephone number.

Purchase of software is another example. By and large Railway has not adopted open Source of Software. We as users are not much aware about the quality of various programs and we adopt as per the professional suggestions given by IS managers. However, now we have to realize that the advice given by IS professionals were not perfect. None of these IS professionals have suggested for the open source. Rather they have suggested for the commercial software, whereas, open source software could have been equally good and also have saved money of Railway.

Restriction imposed by the finance department particular budget limit or not sanctioning better quality computer in the name of austerity measure are another such examples.

Hence, one can conclude that in Railways or any other government department such symbolic exercise of power by IT professionals can be seen at several occasions. Since, this type of exercise of power is least examined and researched and largely occurs outside the awareness of both IS professionals and users, till date no deliberate attempt have been taken, say, by training to curb this kind of influential behavior. However, it is expected that with the growing awareness in future one will be in a position to check it further.

IV) Disaster Management of Computerization in Indian Railways

In the modern world, computers and Internet have opened a doorway to the whole new universe of communication and interaction. It has become a part and parcel of everyday life, particularly in the developed world. Since developing countries are following footprints of the developed world, sooner or later computer will dominate over all sphere of life even in developing countries. Many aspects of life will be eventually assisted or controlled with the computers. Now, when computers and information systems have become so important, it is imperative that we should have such system of computers, which should not fail even in the case of worst kind of disaster.

It may be noted that disaster in computer or ICT (Information and Communication Technology) may be broadly divided into two kinds. First, disaster of outside world, likes flood, earthquake, cyclone, terrorist attack, war etc. Second, disasters of computer system say database crash or CPU failure. If disaster management with ICT is being planned we have to take into account both these factors. For instance if the disaster management plan of passenger reservation system (PRS) is being planned, all the precautions against such disasters has to be taken into account

PHYSICAL DISASTER

Flood

Database storage should be planned in such a location, which should not be low lying with the possibility of flood even in worst situation. For instance when the city of Mumbai was inundated in an incessant rain on 26/6/2005 the data base centre should not be affected. Or, it should not be too close and low to seacoast, which would get flooded in a tsunami kind of situation, as it happened on 26/12/2005 in many parts of South India.

Earthquake

Some part of India is known to be in very active zone for earthquake, where higher probability of earthquake of 6 or more on Richter scale exists. Such zone includes Kutch and some other parts of Gujarat and Himalayan range including most of the North Eastern states. Hence Railways cannot afford to establish its database source in such geographical region. Similarly folded mountain regions of Himalayas, particularly states like Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir etc. are known areas of landslide. Hence Railways have to take precautions that database are not stored in such region.

Cyclone

Every year many parts of country like parts of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, and Gujarat are ravaged by cyclone particularly before the onset of monsoon in the month of May and June. In such regions, very high-speed winds blow followed by very heavy downpour. Normally it leads to disruption of telecommunication network, power supply, road and Railways network and inundation of large areas under water for more than a week together. Such a region cannot be a fit place for the storage of database of any large network.

Terrorism and War

With the increasing discontent in some of the marginalized group and increasing influence of some Islamic terrorist group many parts of the country is witnessing incidence of terrorism act. Similarly our strained relationship with Pakistan has created imminent danger of war in adjoining regions of Pakistan. Hence any planner has to take into account before planning establishment of database storage. Although no regions can be completely free from these dangers some regions say, J & K and North Eastern Regions are more risk prone than others. Within a state or city some of the old localities and congested regions are more risky than others. Hence any planner can take these issues before deciding the location of database storage. Further all databases shouldn’t be located at single location or similar geographical regions. Since India is a very big country with different kinds of geographical regions it is more convenient to establish more than one database in different part of countries so that even if one location is hit by flood, storm , earthquake or terrorism data can be retrieved from other location without any delay.

Power Failure

Problem of power failure is more frequent in a country like India. This problem becomes more severe when a grid failure takes place and total black out for more than twelve hour takes place. Seeing the situation in India it is necessary that wherever the main database and server has been installed there proper UPS with robust generator back up which can sustain at least 24 hour is provided.

Disaster in Computer Network

There are other important areas of disaster, which pertains to a specific company or unit, which is maintaining the computer network. Here we have to plan disaster recovery, i.e. when any disaster has taken place then how soon we are able to recover from the disaster and how early the normal working is restored. At this stage, to assess the entire need, we need to define about several issues like what are the critical issues, how much down time is acceptable and how much the company is ready to bear the cost etc. Here complete landscape including server storage, database, application, files, user/network organisation and business processes. Any serious problem in any one of them may lead to disaster in ICT itself. While these items are essential from a technical perspective the organisational aspect of disaster recovery is as important as the technical part. While we can set up an ideal technical foundation, it is the people, organisation and the procedures in place, which are essential for the overall success of the disaster management project (Baier, 2007).

Disaster Management in Passenger Reservation System

To make case specific an example of Passenger Reservation System (PRS) of Indian Railways (IR) would be evaluated. If the IR has to have to implement its disaster management plan then what are the different steps which could be followed. First of all one need to define what is contingency planning so that one can do risk analysis. Contingency planning ensures that events should not become disaster and business processes are recoverable and all valuable information is always available. An organization like Indian Railways cannot afford to have 99 % availability, as it will lead to 90 hours of downtime during year. It is high time that Railways should go for 99.999% availability, as it will provide less than five-minute downtime during year. However, this will entail a high cost to Railway. But it is worth it, as it helps, first checking all visible loss, which occurs as operation and services come to stand still and secondly checking all invisible loss like loss of productivity, customer reputation etc. One should also calculate properly cost of infrastructure, facility, staff, training, consulting and other services while calculating the above cost.

Disaster Recovery Policy

Once it has been decided about recovery downtime and agreed for its cost then it becomes important to review disaster recovery policy at a regular interval say annually to assure its relevance. Here a team is required to be formed consisting staffs from PRS and information technology and finance. They should perform an initial risk assessment to determine current vulnerabilities and to determine interdependencies. The team should take inventories of information system assets such as computer hardware, software, application and data and should identify critical application system so that prioritisation of key functions can take place.

Mirror Image of Database

Here the primary objective is to protect the Railways in the event when some critical or parts of its operation and computer services got disrupted and became non operational. Presently, Railways are having five databases at Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Secunderabad. To be on safe side the Railways should maintain mirror image of database of one PRS system at another locations on real time basis so that in case of any failure at one PRS system work can be continued instantly with the help of back up available at other PRS system. Since these five cities are located in five different parts of countries and five geographical regions hence these are not likely to be affected by the same disaster. Definitely we need to have surplus bandwidth to implement our disaster management plan.

Backup Storage

Here we will have to set up and maintain, ‘off sight facilities’ for back up storage and electronic vaulting as well as redundant and reliable standby system. Any medium or large computer network is very complex. Different aspects like hardware and software components, storage system application server, storage area networks and clusters which are all interacting themselves are making the overall system highly complex. It takes only one critical component to fail for the whole system to malfunction. Hence, we need to create substantial extra capacity to cover outage of components, which may potentially affect the overall availability.

A disaster recovery system will enable to run such software on five different PRS infrastructure server and storage for storing data. Here the minimum requirement for continuing to provide service after a disaster is to protect any data that may be exposed to a disaster event. Disaster Recovery (DR) employs recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) as its standard. RPO shows the level of data protected at the movement of service recovery and RTO represents the time required before service recovery is achieved. (Yamato et al, 2007).

For Railway RTO level of zero and much shorter RPO has to be defined. At this stage Railways have to establish written policies, contracts and service level agreements with third parties hosting, collocation, telecommunications and interact service providers that facilitate prompt recovery and continuity. Yamato et al. have suggested three layer model system comprising – access, service and data in one building and similar access, service and data in another building some where very far off in another geographical regions and these are interconnected with Data protection.

In this scheme, one building represents the main site of service i.e. usually provided and another building represents the back up site that inherits different service provisions in the case of the main site be affected by a disaster event. For Railways first represents a particular PRS say Mumbai PRS whereas second represents some other PRS say Secunderabad PRS that will be continuously maintaining mirror image of Mumbai PRS. In case there is any failure in Mumbai PRS Secunderabad PRS will take over and provide all information without any time loss.

“Business shadow”

“One of the better-developed programs of mirror imaging is of “Business shadow” developed and owned by Libelle Informatik based at Stuttgart Germany. Business shadow provides that the facility client mirroring complete landscape with multiple terabytes. It consists of four different components-

1. Database Shadow to mirror database to mirror database, which can be Oracle, Max DB MS SQL Server and DBZ or a combination databases.
2. FS shadow to mirror flat files belonging to SAP systems such as Spool files, User Profile, Java, SAP-TRANS. etc.
3. Switch application to Switch IP addresses and Hostnames to second server.
4. Long Distance Enhancement to optimise TCP/IP Traffic, cover network latency, compress files and ship IP packets parallel to the DR sites to further optimise bandwidth utilization.

Prerequisite for setting up and running business shadow is a second server with the same operating system. On the second server database and application binaries are preinstalled. A standard TCP/IP connection between both systems to transport the change is also required. Same disk space on the mirror server to keep a copy of the production database is another requirement.

The process starts with preparing the DR mirror by performing a non-recurring process. The complete system is copied to the mirror server during normal operation without interfering with the production. The database and files are compressed and shipped parallel over the network. Databases, which required creating back up files first (e.g. MS SQL) can be copied using backup files. Finally the initial copy can also be done by using one of the last back up tapes and restore on the mirror server. Other customer may use an existing standby database for the database part. None of such steps requires any downtime or much manual intervention.

The next step is to apply the changes from the primary system to the secondary system, which hold the copy of the database in loading mode. It is actually of advantage to wait a couple of hours before applying the changes to protect the mirror system again faulty transactions. If for example a batch job or malicious manipulation destroys the SAP production database, the mirror database would still be valid and can be recovered to any desired time stamp before the points of destruction within minutes”. (Baier 2007)

Incident Response Team

To make such system successful it is necessary that all critical persons are explicitly aware at the geographical location and different facilities i.e. building, electricity AC etc. The railways also need to term an incident response team consisting PRS supervisors, IT expert and financial personals, their roles & responsibilities are required to be defined in clear cut form. Contact information of each member of incident response team should be displayed prominently at various important locations. This list should be periodically updated. In the event of any disaster which method of communication will be used should be determined. A commercial manager who has some knowledge of information security should be given responsibility & authority to make critical IT decisions. We also need to develop testing standard of high quality and regular listing should be done.

One of the major problems during any disaster is that either the critical person is on leave or some new person has joined and he is not much conversant about different processes. Hence the disaster recovery activities are not carried as per the scheme. To safeguard against such happening it is necessary that the disaster recovery plan is documented and distributed to all concerned.

A Continuous Process

It may be noted that the disaster management plan is a continuous process. It is not done only when any disaster strikes. Rather to manage it properly we have to endeavour for it daily. Hence we should continuously perform data backup, store it safely in backup offsite and we should test those backups regularly for data integrity and reliability. We also need to conduct mock trail at least twice in a year and test check in a manner as if some real disaster has taken place by totally disenabling one PRS for some time. We should see whether all systems have worked properly or not and all failures and shortcomings should be noted be in detail. For test check we need to simulate real tough condition, which would give real exposure to various shortcomings in our plan. Once we have documented all shortcomings then we should discuss in detail and take all necessary actions and modification so that there is no such repetition in future. Hence we need to update our plan regularly. We also need to analyse our plans on ongoing basis to ensure alignment with current business activities and requirements

When the south tower of the World Trade Centre collapsed on 9/11 Deutsche Bank’s New York facility, German banking giant lost its connection to the US market. Almost immediately, however, backup system in Ireland kicked in and Deutsche Bank went onto clear more than $300 in transacting that same day (Patton 2006). In US several companies have been able to bounce back after being hit by hurricanes, Katrina and Rita because they have planned their disaster management plan (Overby. Stephanie, 2005). Similarly we including Indian Railways would be able to meet its customers’ obligation if we follow above described safeguards properly and would set high standard of service.

V) LIMITATIONS OF TELECOMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Indian Railways has been one of the pioneers of extracting benefit of telecommunication network. Morse telephone was widely used, in the beginning, for sending message and data. With the development of telephone technology Railways established its own network. It came widely in use. When computer came the Indian Railways became the pioneer of computer revolution in India. To derive maximum benefit its goods services and passenger services has been computerized and any customer can approach through Internet to access for various information. However in passenger services, the role of computerization has been most spectacular. But there are several problem areas in which computerization has not helped much: -

(1) Although any person can book ticket with the help of computer it is not possible to cancel the ticket on –line. For cancellation the passenger has to personally visit any PRS counter. There the refund of the ticket–fare is not given instantly, as any other. Rather, payment is given only after enquiry, which takes months together.

(2) Different kind of enquiry information say PNR enquiry and Arrival-Departure of train enquiry have been computerized with I V R S. However for the common public the reliability of computerized announcement and I V R S have been very less. Until -unless the passenger enquires face to face with somebody they don’t get satisfied. Further the expected arrival time given by I V R S and actual arrival may vary sometime. Furthermore, this gap may sometime vary very widely due to some last minute hick ups say run-over at the track. In such cases people have to wait at station for hours and they totally lose faith in I V R S. From the Railways’ perspective providing computerized information by interlinking different programmes has been very difficult experience. For instance, we have tried to link the query from public related to train running from the train operating table computer. But till date it has not been much successful experience and the inter-linkage has been failing more often than not. Further in case of any dislocation of services or extra ordinary delay the entire network goes haywire.

(3) Computerized network requires educated users. Many times many users are not competent enough to properly response to reply through the I V R S. Due to this, despite I V R S we have not been able to close most of manual counters. Thus I V R S has led to double expenditure, both manual and computerized counters.

(4) India has a unique problem of multiplicity of regional languages. Whereas, I V R S services have been available only in English and Hindi. Hence many people remain outside the purview of I V R S.

(5) During peak season when there is very high numbers of users, much time it is not possible to get through the line. Further, even though we have more than one channel for inter-linkages in PRS counters, we come across many times that all channels have failed. At that time our all passengers have to wait till at -least one channel get through. This runs for hours, particularly in small places.

In goods services bigger customers can locate their rakes through FOIS (Fright On Line Information System). However, there is some time lag in the information provided and actual location of the rake.

REFERENCES

(1) DR and BCP Strategies- available on

www.mit.gov.in/download/Annexture4_sdc.pdf

(2) Enterprise Architecture and Disaster Recovery Planning by David Rudawitz

Available on www.Antevorte.com/Enterprise-Architecture_and _Disaster_ Recovery_ Planning. pdf

(3) It Pays to Have a Disaster Recovery Plan in Place – Stephanie Overby CIO 2005

Available on http://www.cio.com/print/11931

(4) Logistics Expert Yossi Sheffi Talks Disaster Recovery – Susannah Patton, CIO 2006Available on http://www.cio.com/print/17927

(5) 12 Crisis Lessons from India – CIO India Staff 2007

Available on http://www.cio.com/print/105700

(6) ) Disaster Recovery Requirements Analysis : By Stan Stringfellow 2000

Available on http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0700/drra.pdf

(7) Lightweight Disaster Recovery: By Michelle Mol and James Gentes 2003

Available on www.dell.com/downloads/global/powers/ps1q04_ram_oe.pdf

(8) Gartner Research: Many Effective Disaster Recovery Strategies: By Donna Scott, 2005

Available on www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument doc_cd=126421_38k

(9) Designing a bulletproof Disaster Recovery Architecture for SAP By Bernd Baier, 2007

Available on www.aivant.com/images/stories/SAP_DR _white_paper.pdf

(10) Outline of Disaster Recovery Architecture: By YAMATO Jun-ichi, KAN Masaki, KIKUCHI Yoshihide, TAKAYA Masahiro, TOMI Mitsuhiro, ADACHI Tadashi- 2006

. Available on www.nec.co.jp/techrep/en/journal/g06/n04 060407.pdf