'Our target is to cover 42,000 km by March '08'

Q&A/ A SESHAGIRI RAO

RailTel Corporation of India Limited (RailTel), a Government of India undertaking under the ministry of railways, was set up in September 2000, primarily to commercially exploit the railway communication infrastructure and to expand the existing telecommunication facilities.

RailTel currently functions through its corporate office in New Delhi and its four regional offices at Secunderabad (Southern region), Mumbai (Western region), Kolkata (Eastern region) and New Delhi (Northern region).

A Seshagiri Rao, general manager of the southern region that covers Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, spoke to Business Standard on RailTel's plans. Excerpts from an interview:

Apart from commercial exploitation, RailTel has been formed to modernise the railway communication network. What kind of infrastructure has RailTel built so far?

The Indian Railways has about 62,800 km of railway track passing through 7,000 stations across the country. When RailTel was formed in 2000, the communication network extended to about 5,000 km.

Today, the network, made up of optical fibre cable (OFC) and laid along the seamless right of way, extends to about 28,000 km of which about 24,000 km of cable has been commissioned. Work on another 7,000 km is currently underway.

Over the past four years, we expanded by more than three times and added about 25,000 km to the existing network. The target is to cover 42,000 km by March 2008. We also have 890 microwave towers. RailTel, as on today, is a Rs 1,000-crore company with Railways equity being about Rs 550 crore.

In terms of commercial exploitation, what kind of services has RailTel been offering?

RailTel, being a subsidiary of Indian Railways, is not paid for the services offered to the railways. We generate revenues by marketing the surplus bandwidth.

RailTel has built a state-of-the-art telecom network using synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) technology. We are providing bandwidth, tower space for antennae, and virtual private network (VPN) to corporates. We would also provide long distance services in near future.

Currently, RailTel provides its services to about 100 clients across the country, with the southern region catering to about 30 clients. Almost all the major cellular operators are our customers. We earned a revenue of about Rs 70 crore in the last fiscal.

How do you plan to improve these services?

As of now, telecom operators capture the maximum share of our services. We are looking at banks, corporates and small and medium enterprises to offer our bandwidth service as their requirement is very high.

Three months ago, we signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with London-based Cable & Wireless to provide, manage and arrange bandwidth service to multinational corporations.

Last month, we signed an MoU with Power Grid Corporation of India Limited and GAIL to complement each other's infrastructure. However, we cannot deliver bandwidth to government organisations because of the licence regulations. Once the IP licenses get streamlined, we would be able to provide our services to them too.

RailTel came up with the idea of setting up cyber cafes and ATMs at railway stations. When are they likely to come up?

A total of 280 cyber cafes on a revenue-sharing model have been planned across the country of which 50 are to come up in the first phase by the end of March 2006. Of them, 18 fall in the southern region and eight in Andhra Pradesh.

In the open category, VSNL and Sify participated in the bidding process. The ATM proposal is being discussed at the board level. We have also started two call centres "� in Bangalore and Patna "� on a pilot basis.

The revenue being generated is on the basis of the number of calls hit from a telecom service provider per day. The Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) has been asked to set up eight more such call centres across the country.

What are the other avenues RailTel is planning to explore?

One area that we are looking at is the e-pay concept that we plan to float in the south western and south central railway regions, to begin with. The idea is to make transactions online instead of dealing through a banker's cheque or pay order at the siding terminal.

We also plan to introduce a freight operation information system (FOIS) along the lines of passenger reservation system (PRS) and the recently introduced unreserved ticketing system (UTS). The FOIS would enable one to track and monitor the wagon reading and help in streamlining freight.

What are you future plans for the southern region?

We are likely to scale up our operations and plan to set up two more offices "� in Vijayawada and Thiruvananthapuram. We already have offices in Chennai and Bangalore.