Explained: Can AI help Indian Railways improve passenger experience and safety?
It’s been a couple of years since we have been hearing of Indian Railways planning to adopt AI. Most of the conversation is centred around the use of facial recognition to nab people with criminal antecedents.
Notably, the more obvious and immediate problems that AI can solve for the railways have been conspicuously missing from the discussion.
However, the government seems to be enthusiastic about the prospect AI offers. In a recent AI summit organized by Intel India, Union Minister Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad said, “Health, diagnostics, agriculture and education are some frontiers where AI should bring improvements in the lives of the marginalized and underprivileged.”
In this article, we will discuss AI-based solutions that can make life easier for millions of rail travellers.
Passenger experience and Indian Railways
Let’s focus on the parts that are a point of inconvenience for rail travellers and can be improved using AI. To better understand this, let’s divide passenger experience into three parts:
- Pre-boarding: It includes journey planning and booking, commute to the station, waiting on the platform and boarding the train
- On-board: Travel experience after boarding until deboarding the train
- Post-de-boarding: Stepping foot out of the train at destination station to reaching the individual destination (place of stay/home)
AI in pre-boarding experience
While enough has been written about the scams involved in booking, less is said about the challenges that a traveller faces when planning the journey.
