On Tuesday, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu launched the Project Management and Information System (PMIS), which will allow the railways department to monitor the progress of railway projects across the country, online.
PMIS is a web-enabled IT application that will use drone recordings and CCTV footage to monitor projects. This application will facilitate the watch-over of the lifetime of any railways project. This will improve with time, and the information would be available to the public in future.
“The plan is to roll out PMIS to all the major projects across the country. It will help in online monitoring, mid course corrections to ensure faster execution of the projects. The railways will save crores of money if projects are implemented on or before time,” Mr. Prabhu said. He also mentioned that there will be a system developed to reward high performers, and PMIS will help in identifying the performance to reward timely/early completion of projects.
PMIS is currently being implemented in the Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramullah rail link. It has complex geological formation with steep slopes, rugged terrain tied with rough climatic conditions, thus requiring extensive and continous monitoring.
PMIS encompasses various integrated modules such as Geology and Geographic information, drawing of tunnels, bridge, embankments including drawings integrated with 3D models, budgeting and cost monitoring, incident management, asset management etc.
Currently, Indian Railways has over 600 major projects of network expansion and modernisation costing around Rs. 4.5 lakh crores. Hence PMIS uses information and communication technology to create a consolidated knowledge repository.