IRCTC plans to sell user data to generate Rs 1,000 crore in revenue: Report

The ticketing and catering arm of the Indian Railways, Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), is planning to monetise passenger data in a bid to generate additional revenue. The organisation has, as per reports, has floated a tender inviting companies to help it make sense of the data that it has and identify data sets that can be monetised.

The tender floated by the organisation has two parts. In the first part IRCTC says it wants to “monetize the data in customer/vendor applications and internal applications of Indian Railways by conducting various businesses with both government and private sectors viz tours and travels, hotel, financing, infrastructure development, insurance sector, health sector, manufacturing sector, shipping, aviation, port developers, container operation, mining, energy, etc. for generating revenues and also to enhance facilitation and further improve the services.”

🚨ALERT: Hey train travellers, your data will soon be monetised by the govt. & that too, in the absence of a data protection legislation! @IRCTCofficial has uploaded a tender to appoint a consultant for digital data monetisation.🧵on what this means. 1/8https://t.co/YbyF0tazZi pic.twitter.com/x9vMfGlKxC

— Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (@internetfreedom) August 19, 2022

For this, the organisation will provide basic data of individual passengers of freight, parcel and other public facing application such as name, age, mobile number, gender, address, e-mail ID, number of passenger, class of journey, payment mode, and login and password among other things to the company studying the data, which will then be expected to generate behavioural data such as flow of passengers across the O-D pairs, class of journey, frequency of journey, travel time, booking time, age group and gender, payment mode, number of destinations, and booking modes among other things.

The second part of the tender focuses on the organisation ‘driving strong growth in revenues’ by ‘improving customer experience, expanding the portfolio of products being offered to the customers’ and ‘developing new business-lines and partnerships’.

“IRCTC envisages a revenue generation potential of Rs 1000 Cr through Monetization of its Digital Assets,” it wrote in the tender.

“IRCTC wishes to engage a consulting firm to help in identification, design, and development and roll- out of data monetization opportunities,” it added.

According to the Internet Freedom Foundation, the tasks listed for the appointed consultant include segregation of monetisable data sets, identification of market potential internationally, and preparation of a road-map for data monetisation of the digital data.

It is worth mentioning that while IRCTC does plan to monetise its passenger data, it plans to do it under the purview of various data protection laws.

“The implementation strategies of Bidder shall comply with various Acts or laws including IT Act 2000 and its amendments, user data privacy laws including GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and current ‘Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 of India, and accordingly propose the business models for monetization of Digital Assets,” the organisation wrote in its tender.

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