In what raises questions of privacy over commercial use of railway passenger data, the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) has chalked up plans to monetise its bank of passenger data for doing business with government and private entities.
IRCTC, the ticket booking arm of the Indian Railways, has floated a tender to empanel a consulting firm to prepare a road map to monetise the data. As per a PTI report, the tender may be withdrawn over privacy concerns given that a data protection Bill has not been finalised. However, at the time of publishing, the tender was still live on IRCTC’s website.
According to the tender, customer data that could potentially be monetised includes passengers’ name, age, mobile number, gender, email address, payment mode, “login/password”, among other things. The selected consultant will also have to segregate monetisable data, identify its market potential and prepare a final…
