Rail Neer scam: IRCTC bets big on its water business

The arrests of two senior Northern Railway officials by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) based on the complaints by Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) for conniving with private catering firms to elbow out the latter's bottled water business just shows how IRCTC now means business with its brand — Rail Neer. In a country where summers are getting hotter and several water dispensers at stations too dirty and unhygienic, the railways own estimate of packaged water bottles on the railway network is around 25 lakh per day. Of this, IRCTC with its four bottling plants has a capacity of 6.14 lakh bottles per day. In fact for the current financial year 2015-16, IRCTC has set a target to produce 16 crore bottles with a turnover of Rs 120 crore.

The IRCTC's growth plans for Rail Neer is just as ambitious, said officials. According to an IRCTC statement, in 2014-15, Rail Neer plants produced 11.8 crore bottles with a turnover of Rs 96 crore. In 2013-14 the numbers were 10.45 crore bottles and Rs 88.17 crore revenue. All this, officials said, will not be possible if unscrupulous railway officials ally with private bottled water manufacturers to stab its own sibling in the back.

IRCTC believes recent changes to the way Rail Neer was being pushed in the railways would have a positive effect. It got French company Sidel — a liquid packaging solutions provider — to design its new set of Rail Neer bottles. It reduced the weight of the bottles from 21.5 gram to 19.5 gram. "The water has an 8-stage filtration procedure some of which is imported. There is the Norit Carbon System, imported from Europe, which removes all traces of pesticide residue in water. The 'Marble Chip' filtration process checks and reduces acidic value of water. There is a lot of work that has gone into Rail Neer over the past year and we believe it is a top quality packaged water product," said an IRCTC official.

"It is absolutely criminal when railway officials themselves gang up to ensure that its own PSUs are destroyed. It has been happening in various departments of the railways and the CBI action on these officials is welcome," said a top railway official.

On Sunday the CBI arrested 1987 batch Indian Railway Traffic Service (IRTS) officer Mehar Singh Chalia and 1983 batch IRTS officer Sandip Silas. Silas was former divisional railway manager of Mumbai till in a surprise move he left the post to become private secretary to a UPA minister. Silas did not even complete his two-year DRM tenure. Incidentally, Silas was private secretary to another UPA minister before he was made DRM of Western Railway's Mumbai division.

Of late, Silas was busy trying to promote his own 'world peace venture' called Garland of Peace which strove to get world-famous war sites into what Silas had termed 'Peace Heritage sites'.