How the Indian Railways is leveraging Twitter to reach out to the millions who ride on its trains

A ‘ Twitter Room’ is not what you’d expect to stumble upon in a government office but, at Rail Bhawan in the Capital, the headquarters of Indian Railways (IR), that space has become a beehive of activity ahead of the rail Budget.

Backed by a software that can differentiate tweets on the basis of sentiments — positive, negative and neutral — the IR’s Twitter room handles 4,500 to 5,000 tweets a day, with action being taken on about 70 of them, according to the officer heading IR’s Twitter venture. On the coming Thursday, when railway minister Suresh Prabhu will read out his second rail Budget, the IR’s Twitter team is expecting a flurry of tweets, mainly short commentaries on the Budget. The back-end software has been updated so as to segregate all Budget-related tweets, helping the IR gauge sentiment.

As the software uses keywords such as good, bad and fantastic to measure the mood, the IR hopes to get a pulse of the Twitterati on Prabhu’s Budget much before the railway officers piece together the editorial comments of experts on television channels and newspapers.

Outreach Strategy The rail Budget is expected to give a major thrust to customer services, dispelling the age-old perception of poor service attached to the transport behemoth that ferries as many as 23 million passengers a day. Early this week, former railway minister Lalu Prasad wrote a two-page letter to prime minister Narendra Modi in which he had compared the Railways to a sick jersey cow, claiming that the government had failed to take care of the ministry.

Although the Railways can get back on track only with right financial interventions including raising of more resources — something Prabhu may elaborate in his Budget — its Twitter outreach is expected to fulfil a more immediate objective: positioning the Railways as a customer-friendly organisation.

Prabhu, however, downplays his outreach through Twitter claiming that it is one of several components in the IR’s overall outreach strategy. “Twitter is one of several strategies being adopted by the Railways to improve its customer services. We respond to each telephone call, email and letter,” he says.

“Earlier, only the letters coming from VVIPs were replied to. Now, we respond to each letter that we receive. Phone calls are recorded and responded to. I have made it mandatory for each GM (general manager) and DRM (divisional railway manager) to be active on Twitter,” he adds.

Earlier this week, this writer spent a couple of hours in the Twitter Room to get a sense of the functioning of IR’s first-of-its-kind outreach through social media. It has five workstations manned by computer-savvy employees belonging to IR and sister undertakings like Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation and Rail Vikas Nigam Limited. The people behind the PCs are codenamed Agent 1, 2, 3 and so on. After the software segregates the tweets based on sentiments, each of the agents gets about 500 tweets a day. Each agent has a list of Twitter handles of GMs and DRMs who are tagged in further communications and replies.

Swift Service

The software is such that it allocates priority to a tweet — low, high and urgent, based on the issues contained in the 140-character post. “We usually work on those tweets that are either of high or urgent priority. Tweets regarding medical cases, theft, accidents are considered urgent,” says Agent 1 who was hired from a public sector enterprise (he can’t be named as he is not authorised to talk to the press). In early February, for instance, a passenger who had to travel by the Dibrugarh Rajdhani from Jalpaiguri in West Bengal to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the Capital for urgent medical assistance managed to get his ticket confirmed after making a request on Twitter and the minister himself subsequently intervening.

In this writer’s presence, an urgency cropped up in the Twitter Room. Agent 3 spotted a tweet where one Abhay Pratap Singh traveling in the 15007 Banaras-Lucknow train (coach B-2, Seat 61) complained of high fever. The passenger in his tweet also tagged minister @sureshprabhu. Agent 3 crosschecked the credentials of the passenger by using his PNR number before figuring out that the train that he was traveling in was then located near Dullahapur station, Uttar Pradesh.

Another agent used a land phone to inform the commercial control room of Varanasi that a doctor must attend to the passenger at the next stop, Mau Junction. The phone call was made in addition to the forwarding of the tweet to the DRM, Varanasi, as the matter was a medical emergency. In half an hour, the passenger was attended to by a doctor. He then tweeted, “…thanks for the immediate and effective help. Got the medicines”. In the status column of the agents’ computers, the tweet was then shown as “closed”.

“The beauty of Twitter is that it has just 140 characters. So, the software accurately differentiates the tweets based on the keywords. The idea is to get the information from across the country and attend to the passengers who need our services,” says Ravinesh Kumar, an Indian Railway Traffic Service officer heading the Twitter cell. Now only if the ‘sick jersey cow’ could be cured with such intervention.