During the pandemic, the railways conducted several experiments with fun and creative gadgets at the city stations and hospitals, like introducing medical assistance robots, but none of them lasted
Captain Arjun, a robot, takes the temperature of a passenger. File pic
Nearly two years of Covid-19 had no impact on the Mumbai suburban railway. A lot of fun and creative gadgets, like robots and scanners, were introduced, but none lasted. Despite the changes brought on by the pandemic, no fundamental improvement has been done. The same old, reliable ticket checker remained in place as more people were allowed to take local trains from Sunday.
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“The railways had so much time to do something to handle the post-pandemic travel, but all the ideas considered over the months were temporary. It could have used the pandemic period as an opportunity,” said A V Shenoy from Mumbai Mobility Forum.
"After trespassing, overcrowding is one reason behind deaths on tracks. Even during the pandemic, the infrastructure was not upgraded as needed, like automated entry and exit systems. The least the authorities could do is form a Safety Committee with participation of Railways, Disaster Management department, and officials from municipalities and state along with commuter organisations,” said Siddhesh Desai, vice-president of the Mumbai Rail Pravasi Sangh.
Also read: Mumbai local trains: 1.16 lakh season passes sold in four days
Ideas tried and tested
The authorities planned Metro-type flap gates and colour-coded tickets, but the sheer volume of crowd has been the major hurdle. There was talk of taking suggestions from IIT, developing QR codes, having staggered timings, setting up local units of government offices and many other doable ideas, but all of them were temporary.
Use of robotics and AI
Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) were brought to use at railway stations and hospitals. While automated robots checked temperatures and oxygen saturation level at stations' entry points, remote-controlled ones did work of hospital staff by carrying essentials, medicines and meals inside quarantine wards of railway hospitals.
The Railway Protection Force also developed a robot, Captain Arjun, for monitoring body temperature. It was also equipped with motion sensors, PTZ (Pan, Tilt, Zoom) cameras and a dome camera with in-built internal storage for recording in case there was a network failure.
Rakshak was developed for remote interaction between doctor and patient, and to measure health parameters, deliver medicine or food to patients. A robot at Dr Kotnis Memorial Railway Hospital, Solapur, dispensed hand sanitisers, checked temperature and oxygen saturation level of patients.
Though all these proved to be of immense help, they were temporary. The need is to have a permanent infrastructure upgrade of the Mumbai suburban railway.
What could be done
“In fact, one of the key things that the Indian Railways needs to do is to decentralise decision-making, which will help it make more realistic choices for the city,” Shenoy said.
Senior transport expert Ashok Datar said data science along with AI could be implemented for better use. “We should ask commuters to send their preferred travel time and direction for both journeys to a dedicated WhatsApp number. This data can be processed to find out the number of people wanting to use a rail network in a certain time. I assume this data should be 75 per cent accurate. Use an accuracy factor and we could rework the timetable accordingly,” he said.
A railways spokesperson said, “It would require a complete structural overall of the system to replicate the model of urban Metros on suburban trains in Mumbai. The successful working model of flap gates on Indian Railways is on the Kolkata Metro Rail, but it has been there since the inception.”
In the given circumstances, the key was to cut down the crowd with staggered office timings, officials said.
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