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The decision to withdraw the offer was taken at the IRCTC’s annual general meeting on Friday before the panel hearing.
Rail catering and ticketing arm IRCTC has withdrawn a controversial tender to hire a consultant to monetize passenger and freight customer data due to privacy concerns, officials said on Friday.
The IRCTC on Friday informed the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology, chaired by Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, that it was no longer going ahead with the tender process.
A parliamentary panel has summoned officials of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) following a PTI report on a tender for the appointment of a digital data monetization consultant.
IRCTC MD and Chairman Rajni Hasija deposed before the panel along with other officials.
“IRCTC has withdrawn the tender in light of non-approval of the Data Protection Act,” an IRCTC representative informed the panel.
The decision to withdraw the offer was taken at the IRCTC’s annual general meeting on Friday before the panel hearing.
According to the tender document, the data to be studied will include information captured by the national carrier’s various public applications such as “name, age, mobile number, gender, address, email ID, class of travel, payment method, login or password”. and other details.
IRCTC has more than 10 million users of which 7.5 million are active.
The tender document titled “Scope of work for Project A: To study the monetization of Indian Railways (IR) digital data” said the consultant would also be given access to digital data systems that generate behavioral data such as passenger flow, journey class , travel frequency, travel time, booking time, age group and gender, payment method, number of destinations and booking modes.
