Indian Railways : 139 Rail Sampark

The central idea behind this project was providing correct information across
the country millions of people using Asia's largest rail network . This project
has replaced all the discrete railway telephonic inquiries functioning in
individual stations, mostly supported by railway staff over telephone, with a
single three digit unique telephone number 139, which is a Category-1-code
defined by DoT that can be dialed from any Land line/WLL/mobile phone. IRES
obtains Information from existing computerized National Train Enquiry System (NTES)
and Passenger Reservation System (PRS).

With a capability of handling 20 lakh calls per day, this project involved
plenty of business and technical challenges. Key business challenges included
changing mindset of railway users, training 2000 agents to handle manual quires
at call center, and setting up infrastructure. Technical challenges included
designing a system to handle 20 lakh calls per day, accessing call overflow from
four Zonal hubs, keeping 200 % redundancy in case of link failure between zonal
hub and local call center, and data synchronization.