Inside the Indian Railways' high-tech project to map defects in tracks

At present, thousands of trackmen throughout the country patrol the railway tracks every day to manually check every nut and bolt for defects

The manual safety checks of railway tracks may soon be a thing of the past if the Indian Railways’ recent experiment of using a three-dimensional (3D) mapping technology to do the job is adopted across its networks. The pilot for the project is being conducted by Mumbai-based Genesys International Corporation in a stretch under the Konkan Railways near Ratnagiri in Maharashtra. The experiment is using a remote image sensing technology called LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to spot defects and wear and tear in the tracks.

This comes close on the heels of finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman rooting for private sector