Officials consider Chennai project

Mumbai: Railway authorities are looking at various options to monitor and control entry and exit points at suburban stations. The authorities are considering Chennai pilot project in which automated gates that can be used only by a ticket holder, are installed at a small suburban section. The project has been launched along with the Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), which is the IT arm of the railways.

Although the experiment is in its nascent stages, officials said that this has never been done on the railway stations and the effort can go either way. CRIS general manager (Mumbai) Uday Bobate said, “We don’t know how the experiment will work because no one has ever done this on a railway station in the country. Unlike Metros, where there are controlled access point, the railways has been built in an era where security concerns were not even in the railways’ dictionary.”

He further added, “The success in Mumbai is also extremely tricky, we have too many people who travel at a certain time. We will need a technical system that is sophisticated enough to handle the crowd during peak hours.”