Most of the population in India is an active user or atleast aware of what IRCTC is all about. Various reports have suggested that IRCTC has cancelled its tender regarding hiring consultants to monetize passengers. A tender is basically a contract which encompasses the prices for different kinds of work or materials that everyone approves of. There is no mention of any quantity but a time period is given. Go through the entire article to learn more about this tender.
IRCTC’s statements
Shashi Tharoor, the chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee was told by IRCTC that they were no longer moving forward with this tender. The recent reports suggest that an official notification was also posted by them in which they said that the contract regarding Data Monetization has been canceled by them.
More about IRCTC
As per various reports, at the beginning of this month, IRCTC was looking to hire a consultant who could analyze the data related to railways and help in monetizing it in the near future. The Indian Railways has more than 10 crore users out of which 7.5 crore users are active users.
The Tender
This tender contains a lot of information about the transporter’s various public-facing applications which include various categories like name, gender, password etc. The tender also states that whenever the consultant for the job gets shortlisted, he/she will be provided with all the information concerning these applications and this study will be called the ‘Monetization of Digital Data of Indian Railways’. Once employed, the consultant needs to go through the data of the passenger and know each and every detail about them. Along with this, the consultant would also be given digital access, so that he/she can easily learn about the data concerning the behavior of the passengers such as their journey, travel time, booking time, etc. The parliament had also requested a PTI report on the tender for the hiring of the consultant. The motive behind this practice was to increase income by leveraging data assets and position in the market. This was to be accomplished through working on providing a better experience to customers , developing new business etc. Several reports claim that an IRCTC official stated that the cancellation of the tender is because the Data Protection Bill was not approved. The Personal Data Protection Bill has been disapproved by the government after 4 years of it being in the process of being approved.
