Technology should be used in storing documents: Railway Official

PANAJI: Dealing with huge piles of documents on a regular basis, officials at the Indian Railways here laid emphasis on the need to move to technological platforms for effective and smooth working.

"Government in general and railways particularly deal with plenty of documents. For us, it is also very important to access older documents," Suchito Das, chief operations manager, South Eastern Railways told PTI yesterday.

Das was in Goa to participate in the Global Document Management Conclave organised by SoftAge, a leader in document management system.

Moving in tandem with technology, while reservation services are available online and even on mobile, the official emphasised that similar technological usage should be brought in to store documents related to public.

"We face difficulties on a daily basis to retrieve documents. This kind of technology, once we go in we should be able to store, retrieve and search documents in a much more efficient way," he said.

Das said Indian Railways should go on technology platform in near future.

A lot of paper work is required to be done for smooth functioning of Indian railways and storing of documents in physical form becomes cumbersome.

"Such kind of conventional storing also becomes person specific. If somebody is custodian of some document and if he is on leave, then it becomes a problem," Das added.

He pointed out that railways have been using technology for reservations and also freight operating system and such technology usage is also needed to be implemented in storing documents related to public, including ticket requisition slips.

"Such a quick access to information from the public documents is required because we have to give feedback to various law enforcing agencies on regular basis," he added.