NIS to advise on rail safety

The National Institute of Sales (NIS), in association with the US-based risk and insurance services firm Marsh Inc, is working on a white paper for the Railways to help the organisation in safety planning and crisis management areas.

NIS also has a contract to train 100,000 rail employees in the customer care segment by 2007. The rail ministry is likely to pay Rs 15 crore for getting its 100,000 front-line commercial staff trained in the basics of customer care.

The categories of employees covered include the enquiry-cum-reservation clerks, goods- and parcel- clerks, booking staff, ticket checkers and the members of the Railway Police Force.

The contract with NIS was signed in 1999 and was renewed in 2002 for a period of five years. So far, the institute has trained 55,000 employees.

When the Indian Railway Customer Care Institute was set up in April, 1999, at Kishanganj, NIS was entrusted with the task of putting the faculty in place and designing the training programme.

This was the first instance of the Railways outsourcing training programmes. At present, NIS employees are deployed in all nine zonal training research institutes of the Railways.

However, the contract is to be reviewed by the Railway Board after the presentation of the vote-on-account for the Railways on January 30.

"We have been imparting training based on 19 parameters that were identified by Market Operations Research International, a British firm. Recently, we have hit upon the idea of adopting railway stations as model stations and putting all employees there on five-day training programmes," Sanjeev Duggal, president, NIS Sparta Ltd, told Business Standard.

The institute has already finished these sessions at Baroda, Chennai, Tata Nagar and is soon to begin work on Raipur, Trivandrum, Ranchi, Ahmedabad and Bangalore among others.