The Western Railways introduced an upgraded software to monitor coaches on real-time basis apart from keeping tabs on lethargic staff. The move is aimed to curb rising cases of theft, especially during long-distance travel.

Starting from Friday, multiple 5-member teams with body cameras and GPS-based mobile apps are deployed on all the Rajdhani and Shatabdi Express trains in India.

In an attempt to bring in more transparency with passengers, the railways had earlier introduced on-duty police staff on Rajdhani trains and equipped them with body cameras which had a capacity to store around 32GB footage in-built storage devices. Only in case of an emergency situation, the footage recorded in the camera was reviewed.

The e-patrolling mobile app will be set up on the patrol staff's phones and it will be paired with the body camera. Information like the officer's name, rank, beat and assigned patrolling perimeter on the train will be fed into the app. The camera will record and relay all the information to the main control room, which also includes the number of rounds undertaken by the concerned officer and his current location.

"This will provide an extra hand to the security agencies and will certainly improve the passengers' security," said Arun Tripathi, divisional security commissioner of Western Railway, Mumbai Central division.

The introduction of e-patrolling mobile app received a mixed response from commuters. Some said that the system will work only if the patrol staff is alert on the duty, others sounded positive about the move.

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