LAHORE, April 26: Railway Minister Ghaus Bakhsh Mahar will open an information technology centre at the railway headquarters here on Monday.

The centre has been established at a cost of Rs8.5 million in one year to set up local area network (LAN) and wide area network (WAN) to meet railways requirement.

The networking will provide a round-the-clock communication link among the ministry, the main and divisional headquarters.

All these offices will be able to exchange data, hold internal video conferences and net meetings without any delay.

The centre will also be responsible for preparing software to meet future requirements of the organization as well as maintaining important data files from across the railway network.

Computers and accessories worth Rs20 million have so far been purchased while an allocation of Rs1.65 million has also been made for acquiring more equipment. Moreover, Rs1.20 million has been earmarked for paying software licensing fee.

Railway authorities are also planning to establish IT directorates at divisional level in the next phase to computerize goods hauling and linking them with sea-ports, besides bringing on line accounts, payroll, assets, outstanding dues and recoveries in each division.

Under the computerization drive, ticketing and reservation, store inventory and accounts system have so far been computerized while legal, personnel, vigilance and statistics departments of the railways have been provided necessary systems.

To run the new system smoothly, 191 employees, including 71 officers, posted at the headquarters offices have been trained.

Inventory control in the organization had for the first time been introduced in 1982 at the Mughalpura depots. But, since then no improvement was made in it as neither the already computerized record was brought online nor it was extended to other depots.

Centre director Waqar Nisar said under the proposed plan, 24 railway depots from across the country were being brought online, facilitating the authorities to see at one click of a button which spare part was available at the nearest depot, thus reducing the transportation (of the spare part’s) cost and the time needed to spot a specific item through manual system.

Postings, transfers, promotions, and other personal data of the 95,000-strong railway staff is being automated under the human resource management project. While about 6,000 likely users of the system are being trained at the Walton training centre of the organization.