Rail Analysis India March 2018 Digital Magazine | Page 130

Exclusive Interview | 129 Track & Infrastructure Track & Infrastructure 130 | Exclusive Interview leverage on global partnerships for transfer of technology collaborations, in order to leverage on the strong partnerships that India has across the globe, especially also in the rail industry already for many years. We at Cyient have seen that for many of our rail customers, India has been a key market in the recent years. There are some key dimensions, which are universal to rail projects globally and play a decisive role in the execution strategy (e.g. reflected in certain international standards and the recent updates of the same) – and India as a nation needs to ensure that we leverage upon the lessons learnt there globally through these global partnerships. Exclusive INTERVIEW WITH Ms Beatrice Lippus Before we understand your industry views, can you give us a bit of background on Cyient and yourself? Cyient is a global rail engineering solutions provider with over 25 years of rich engineering heritage. We have been in the Railway industry for the last 14 years, and have extended engineering support to over 200 projects globally. We have partnered with our customers to deliver technologically superior products, achieve faster time-to-market and deliver projects in a cost-efficient manner in the segments of rolling stock and signalling – across the globe. We partner with rolling stock OEMs and rail signalling providers enabling them to effectively Design, Build and Maintain assets and efficiently realize projects globally. Ms Beatrice Lippus Associate Vice President, Transportation, Cyient I have been with Cyient for 10+ years now, and I’m an Associate Vice President at Cyient’s Transportation Business Unit and Managing Director of our German entity. I’m actually half Swiss which probably can explain my passion for railways – as Switzerland is known to be a country where there is a divided opinion on whether we set our trains by clocks. Or the other way around. Just for your reference, an average Swiss person travels 2430 kilometres by train every year. especially like to highlight the focus on safety and increased use of new technologies which is emphasized in there. To me, rail industry’s “raison d’être” are safety, reliability, and efficiency – with digitization and IoT being key technology drivers to it. Smart railway networks leverage interconnected technological solutions combined with modern infrastructure such as automatic ticket systems, digital displays, and smart meters. However, the specifics of railway industry being legacy heavy, project driven and technology focused require from my perspective an adaptation of IoT compared to consumer world as an “Internet of Trains” – for which the investments as envisaged are definitely needed. It is heartening to see that the Indian ecosystem is investing heavily to scale up the current legacy systems to new generation technologies for which we have seen the benefit in the global projects we have been involved with already – whether it is the TCAS or ETCS or the CBTC based technologies. And how do you see India embedded in a global context there? In the recent budget announcement, India has shown its plans to procure a significant amount of physical assets as well as