Indian Railways’ plan for customer data monetisation may have to be shelved on privacy fears that have lately taken centrestage.
Railways was targeting Rs 1,000 crore in revenue from its its passenger and freight customer data. As of now, it has floated a tender to hire a consultant for the same, but the latest buzz is that the plan may be withdrawn amid concerns over privacy raised by many social media users, including advocacy groups.
According to a PTI report, highly-placed sources said the plan will be withdrawn “considering the fact that the Data Protection Bill has not been finalised”.
As per clarifications made by the govt, the consultant would advise IRCTC on ways to improve its existing business, apart from planning strategies to monetise opportunities arising in future.
The IRCTC has over 10 crore users, 7.5 crore of them being active users. The plan was to entail studying the data captured by various public facing applications — like name, age, mobile number, gender, address, e-mail ID, class of journey, payment mode, login or password, etc.
The consultant will be tasked with looking into the data of passenger, freight and parcel businesses of the Indian Railways such as PRS, NGeT, NTES, UTS, Rail Madad, FOIS, TMS, e-CRM, and PMS, as well as vendor-related data from applications like IREPS, VMS and IPAS, the report said.
The focus is likely to be on behavioural data like class of journey, frequency of journey, travel time, booking time, age group and gender, payment mode, number of destinations and booking modes.
Internet Freedom Foundation, a Delhi-based non-governmental organisation advocating digital rights and liberties, raised concerns over Railways’ plan. The NGO outlined the pitfalls of the plan in a series of tweets.
Privacy fears may have been overblown as IRCTC does not “sell its data and neither has any intention to do so”, insider sources said.
“IRCTC will also develop new businesses on its own platform and will need assistance from market leaders. IRCTC does not store any financial data of its customers at its end, as at the time of online payment for its various services, control is passed on to the respective payment gateway or bank for the payment,” the sources said.
