e-Office shutdown derails administrative works in Indian Railways

For about a week, routine administrative work was affected across Indian Railways after National Informatics Centre’s (NIC’s) e-Office, a product of RailTel, crashed.

According to official sources, the entire file movement and related communications in the Railways came to a grinding halt after the e-Office system failed. Emergency and urgent files were handled manually during this period. Railways is one of the many departments that had fully migrated to the platform.

Railtel restored normalcy on Friday, the sources said.

NIC e-Office, a workflow-based system that replaced the existing manual handling of files with a more efficient electronic system, is in operation in more than 236 establishments of the Indian Railways across the country and has onboarded 1.47 lakh users.

Down for 4-5 days

Confirming that NIC e-Office was down for 4-5 days, Southern Railway Chief Public Relations Officer M. Senthamil Selvan said that urgent administrative files were dealt with manually during the down time.

The e-Office going offline did not affect passenger and freight train operations as the Railways had an independent and dedicated IT infrastructure to run those services. “Railtel is maintaining e-Office on behalf of the Ministry of Railways and Southern Railway is one of the users,” he said.

Railway officers said they had no idea why the systems went down. They did not want to comment on the security of backup data stored in iCloud and whether it was fully accessible after the services were restored. They said messages were sent to senior officials in the Zonal Railways in the middle of last week that the infrastructure issue persisted and all e-Office instances, including Railway Board, remained unavailable. The restoration process was dependent on the storage utilisation, the message said.

A top Railtel officer heading the Southern Region did not respond to phone calls or email query sent by The Hindu seeking clarifications on the reasons for the failure, safety of backup and other related issues.

Railtel has stated on its website that the NIC e-Office is a cloud enabled software application developed by National Informatics Centre (NIC), which is hosted at Tier-III Uptime USA-certified data centres at Secunderabad and Gurugram for RailTel customers.

Besides the Railways, the application is also hosting services for many government organisations, including Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Development Corporation (IRCTC), Rail Vikas Nigam Limited (RVNL), etc.

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