SRESTHA & SUTRA: The New Research Wings of Railways

SRESTHA refers to Special Railway Establishment for Strategic Technology & Holistic Advancement. This is a proposed special unit of Indian Railways comprised mostly of scientists and railway experts.

Currently, Indian Railway has a research arm called “Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO)“. However, there are several issues with this RDSO. In most of its time, the RDSO is busy in finalizing the standards and specifications for the new equipment to be acquired by Railways. Since most of the new technology in Railways is imported, the RDSO is not able to do in-house research work on various technologies required for upgradation in signalling and telecommunication system, track designing, improvement in rolling stock etc.

But despite of these issues, RDSO is credited for developing of pre-stressed concrete sleepers used for laying tracks and the newly designed double Decker coaches. We note here that in December 2015, the Railways had created a committee to review and redefine the role RDSO.

Proposed Functions of SRESTHA

According to proposals, the RDSO will continue to focus on day-to-day issues while the upcoming SRESTHA would be responsible for long-term research for improving the overall functioning of Indian Railways. It is expected to be headed by a reputed scientist, who would report directly to the Chairman.

SUTRA: the new cross functional team of Indian Railways

Indian Railway collects over 100 Terabytes of data every year, yet it is hardly analysed to gain business insights. Towards this direction, the Railway Budget 2016-17 has proposed to set up a dedicated, cross functional team called Special Unit for Transportation Research and Analytics (SUTRA) for carrying out detailed analytics leading to optimised investment decisions and operations. SUTRA will be comprised of professional analysts and best-in-class decision support systems. Its core function will be data-mining and data backed decision making.