Despite lockdown RailTel completes 2nd phase work of NIC e-Office implementation

Despite nationwide lockdown due to COVID19 outbreak, RailTel has successfully completed the phase 2 of implementing NIC e-office. RailTel started work of Phase 2 (46 Divisions with 31637 users) in the month of February 2020 with a target of completion by 30th June 2020. But despite lockdown restrictions, RailTel continued the pace of implementation and completed the work 55 days before deadline. Total 17981 users of 25 divisions offices were enabled with e-office platform, along with user trainings over video conferences, during the lockdown period.  In two phases, RailTel has enabled 87629 users across 105 establishments of Indian Railways (Zonal HQs, Divisions, CTI, PUs, Workshops etc.) to handle all their manual file work remotely on digital platform. Till date 163658 e-Files and 504777 e-Receipts have been created, replacing the manual work mode by Railway officials. RailTel has also provided Virtual Private Network connections to Railway officials for enabling them to process the file works remotely.  Due to availability of e-office, majority of file work in Railways can continue smoothly without physical presence in offices which is a boon in a time of crisis like this.   NIC e-Office is a cloud enabled software developed by National Informatics center (NIC) that is being deployed/hosted from RailTel Tier III UPTIME USA certified data centres at Secunderabad and Gurgaon. The aim of e-Office implementation is to provide reliable, efficient, and effective way to handle office files & documents. There is an absolute transparency as anything once written on the file cannot be changed or undone. There is also a monitoring mechanism to check where the files are held up. Talking about completing the work during lockdown, Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel, said, “It was big challenge for RailTel team to complete the work during the lockdown phase as resource movement was restricted. RailTel team couldn’t visit the division offices due to the lockdown and the implementation work needed to be done remotely and it was very time consuming as well. RailTel team completed the majority of the work remotely in coordination with Railway officials over phone and email. The crucial part of implementation is the training of officials to handle the platform.  Since physical presence of RailTel officials and Railway users were not possible, the entire training was also done remotely using video conferencing and on call support. Training videos were prepared so that users can see them again and again to get a grip on the e-office usage procedure.”