Ashwini Vaishnaw Launches Indian Railway Innovation Policy- ‘StartUps for Railways’

Indian Railways, the national transporter, has taken an important step forward in the field of innovation by involving start-ups and other entities. Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Railways, Communications, Electronics and Information Technology, launched "StartUps for Railways" today in Rail Bhavan, New Delhi.

Through the participation of a large and untapped startup ecosystem, this policy will bring scale and efficiency in the fields of operation, maintenance, and infrastructure creation. Ashwini Vaishnaw, speaking at the event, stated that the long-running discussions about integrating technology into Indian Railways have now taken firm shape in the form of this initiative launched today.

The Minister expressed his delight at the launch of this initiative, saying that through this platform, start-ups will have a good opportunity to connect with railways. Out of over 100 problem statements received from various divisions, field offices/zones of Railways, 11 have been taken up for phase 1 of this programme, such as rail fracture, headway reduction, and so on. These will be presented to start-ups in order to find innovative solutions.

Railway Minister encouraged startups to take advantage of this opportunity and assured them of Indian Railways' support in the form of a 50% capital grant, as well as market, scale, and ecosystem assurances. The following are the key details of the Indian Railway Innovation Policy:

• Grant up to Rs. 1.5 Crore to innovator on equal sharing basis with provision of milestone-wise payment. The complete process from floating the problem statement to the development of the prototype is online with a defined timeline to make it transparent and objective.

• Trials of prototypes will be done in Railways. Enhanced funding will be provided to scale up deployment on the successful performance of prototypes.

• Selection of Innovator/s will be done by a transparent and fair system which will be dealt with through an online portal inaugurated today by Minister of Railways.

• Developed Intellectual property rights (IPR) will remain with innovators only.

• Assured developmental order to innovator.

• De-centralization of the complete product development process at the divisional level to avoid delays.

Field units were asked to provide Problem Areas in the month of May. So far, approximately 160 problem statements have been received in response. To begin, 11 problem statements have been identified and uploaded to the portal in order to be addressed through the new Innovation Policy.

• Broken Rail Detection System

• Rail Stress Monitoring System

• Headway Improvement System for suburban section interoperable with Indian Railways National ATP system

• Automation of Track Inspection Activities

• Design of superior Elastomeric Pad (EM Pad) for Heavy Haul Freight Wagons

• Development of online Condition Monitoring System for traction motors of 3-phase Electric Locomotives

• Light-weight wagon for transporting commodities like Salt

• Development of analytical tool by using digital data for improving passenger services

• Track Cleaning Machine

• App for post-training revision & self-service refresher courses

• Use of Remote Sensing, Geomatics and GIS for bridge inspection

(Source: PIB)