IRCTC Floats Tender to Appoint Consultant to Monetise Digital Data: Details

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has floated a young searching for to monetise digital knowledge of the Indian Railways and the IRCTC. The latter is trying to appoint a marketing consultant for ‘digital knowledge monetisation’. The tender, which seeks to utilise the information from passenger, freight, and parcel trains, was noticed by digital liberties organisation Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) on Friday. It is price noting that India at present doesn’t have a knowledge safety regulation to manage the usage of residents’ private info.

According to the e-tender document (archived version) uploaded on the IRCTC web site, titled ‘Consultancy for Digital Data Monetization’, the general public sector endeavor is trying to appoint a consulting agency for the challenge, so as to generate as much as Rs. 1,000 crore in income. The deadline for tender affords is August 29, and the IRCTC has set the earnest cash deposit (EMD) at Rs. 2 lakh, in line with the doc.

The IRCTC states that it’s “a reservoir of huge amount of digital data which opens several opportunities for IRCTC for monetization” and that it needs to “leverage its data assets and market position to drive strong growth in revenues”. The consulting agency shall be anticipated to review IRCTC knowledge together with knowledge from the railway’s passenger, freight, parcel, catering, tourism, and different operations.

The knowledge that IRCTC has listed out within the tender (web page 11) consists of buyer knowledge captured from the Indian Railways, which incorporates “basic data” corresponding to their identify, age, cellular quantity, gender, tackle, e-mail addresses, in addition to their class of journey, cost mode, and login info — together with their username and password.

According to the IRCTC’s tender, the marketing consultant shall be anticipated to mixture the information captured, segregate the information, and “identify market potential internationally” for particular knowledge units. They should additionally set up procedures and protocols for long-term monetisation of the digital knowledge of the Indian Railways, and “handhold” the monetisation course of.

In order to suggest enterprise fashions for monetisation of knowledge, the tender states that the consulting agency ought to examine laws associated to info know-how, together with the IT Act, 2000 and its amendments, in addition to knowledge privateness legal guidelines such because the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the “current Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 of India”. However, because the IFF factors out, Personal Data Protection Bill was withdrawn by the federal government on August 3.

The digital liberties organisation has highlighted the dangers of monetising buyer knowledge, stating {that a} revenue maximisation purpose may lead to elevated knowledge assortment, which might be in violation of the ideas of knowledge minimisation and objective limitation. Meanwhile, the monetisation would happen within the absence of a private knowledge safety regulation. “Past experiences from the misuse of [the] Vahan database amplify fears of mass surveillance & security risks,” the IFF stated in a tweet.

Gadgets 360 has reached out to the Indian Railways for remark and can replace this text when a response is acquired.

On August 3, the federal government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2021, saying that it was engaged on a brand new complete regulation. The invoice had proposed regulation of transmission of knowledge throughout borders, whereas empowering the federal government to hunt knowledge from firms. At the time, Union Minister of Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw mentioned that the federal government was hopeful of getting new laws handed by the Budget session of parliament.