“Freight operation information system of Indian Railways and its effectiveness in South East Central Railway”

Indian Railways decided to adopt the use of information technology to improve the utilization and maintenance of its rolling stock for better capacity utilization, increased output and to give better service to the customers. It was also realised that such computerised management information system will help in planning, monitoring and decision making. It was a very difficult task, due to its enormous size, consisting of different types of vehicles, rolling stocks, cargo, loco, geographical areas, ghat sections, number of stations, different gauges, electrified and non-electrified sections each having complexities of its own. Gradually all the information was collected and integrated almost all the activities of the freight operations were included. This led to an integrated information and management system for controlling and monitoring the multifarious activities and is known as Freight Operations Information System. In this paper, we are going to present the effectiveness of the Freight operations Information System in SECR based on survey conducted over different FOIS locations of SECR.