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The Ministry of Railways has completed the process of selection of consultants for introduction of accounting reforms in the railways in tune with the emerging globalization of Indian economy.
The positioning of consultants and projects kick-off is expected to commence shortly in January 2005.
The consultants are expected to complete the new accounting architecture within 15 months from January 2005. Thereafter, the implementation is expected to be completed within the next 15 months all over the Indian Railways.
The re-designing of new accounting and costing system and its implementation in a pilot project will take 24 months. In all, it will take 30 months for its implementation on the entire Indian Railways.
Indian Railways will constitute a suitable counterpart team to ensure timely completion of the accounting reforms projects to be completed by June 2007.
Accounting reforms seeks to support existing Government reporting requirements but further more effectively, be consistent with internationally accepted Railway Accounting Standards and Practices, and also have the capacity to support elaborate Lines of Services (LOS) and Lines of Business (LOB) reporting of both costs and revenues. The LOS and LOB will emerge and evolve over the next decades to represent various passenger and freight sub-markets.
Typical requirements would be profit measurement for various passenger trains or sets of trains and for different classes of passenger services and for freight services, including both individual shipments as well as more aggregated levels by commodity. It would also include the capacity to identify revenues and costs for Fixed Infrastructure Provider services, including specific branch lines (to support the analysis of Public Service Oriented obligations) as well as the specific assignment of costs, revenues and asset responsibility for separable services such as suburban services. Because of the changing nature of these requirements, it is critical that the accounting system be able to evolve in a timely, dynamic and efficient manner.
MYS:BKS:NC
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