'Start-ups for Railways' to get Rs 1.5 cr for tech innovations

Tirupati: Engineering students have been showing a great zeal to capture the innovation policy of Indian Railways. In a major initiative, the Indian Railways has taken a major initiative in the field of innovation almost a month ago. It wants to push the innovations through the participation of start-ups named as 'Start-ups for Railways'. To bring awareness about the new policy, the railway authorities in Tirupati have conducted a seminar at SV University for engineering students and explained the salient features.

The Railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw launched the policy which aims at investing more than Rs 50 crore annually to fund start-ups. It will be on a cost sharing basis in 50:50 equal proportion for innovators and the Indian Railways.

Under this, a policy grant to innovators up to Rs 1.5 crore will be provided with milestone wise payment. When the innovator comes up with the idea, Indian Railways will follow it through to the product after proof of concept and scaling it up. It may finally adopt the successfully developed technology for regular use. The intellectual property rights (IPR) for innovations will remain with the innovator.

It was expected that the policy will bring scale and efficiency besides taking leverage of innovative technologies developed by Indian start-ups, MSMEs and others. When the railways asked its field units to provide problem areas around 160 problem statements had been received.

Out of these, the railways have identified 11 problem statements for its new policy in phase 1. The problem statements include broken rail detection system, Rail stress monitoring system, track inspection technologies for accurate inspection, track cleaning machine, use of remote sensing, geomatics and GIS for bridge inspection among others.

At the awareness seminar held at SV University on Friday, Tirupati station director K Satyanarayana explained the process of submitting proposals and other steps to the students. Station master Chinnapa Reddy, chief commercial inspectors A Parameswar Raju and P Srikanth also took part.

Speaking to The Hans India, the station director Satyanarayana said that basically the railway projects cover electrical, electronics, mechanical and civil engineering departments though ideas in other areas may also be useful. Such seminars will help the youth to get an idea of the ongoing initiatives so that they can work on them and submit their proposals.

In the next phases, experts will come to the students to further expose the deep insights into the policy and may conduct more awareness meetings in other institutes as well to encourage start-ups.