Western Railway Launches 'Sugamrail' – Smart Digital Monitoring System For Lifts, Escalators & Earthing Pits

Western Railway has taken a pioneering leap in digital governance and passenger safety with the launch of SUGAMRAIL, a first-of-its-kind software-based platform on Indian Railways designed for real-time monitoring of lifts, escalators and earthing pits.

According to a press release issued by Vineet Abhishek, Chief Public Relations Officer of Western Railway, the application has been developed under the leadership of Vivek Kumar Gupta, General Manager/WR, with the objective of integrating technology into core safety and maintenance systems. Earlier, the supervision of lifts, escalators and earthing infrastructure was dependent on manual registers maintained at multiple depots, which led to delays in fault detection, fragmented reporting and limited accountability. With the implementation of SUGAMRAIL, more than 470 lifts / escalators and around 21,500 earthing pits across Western Railway have now been brought under a unified digital dashboard accessible to officers at both divisional and headquarters level. The system ensures round-the-clock visibility of equipment health, automatically flags repeated failures or overdue inspections and enables timely intervention with high compliance. It provides detailed asset-wise and cause-wise failure analysis, while Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Maintenance Compliance Rate are used to assess asset reliability

Beyond its operational advantages, the initiative significantly enhances passenger convenience and safety. The digital tracking of lift and escalator performance ensures faster attention to breakdowns, benefitting senior citizens, Divyangjan passengers and women travelling with children. Simultaneously, the structured monitoring of earthing resistance helps prevent electrical hazards and ensures strict adherence to safety standards at stations and railway establishments. By replacing physical registers with a digitised, analytics-backed mechanism, Western Railway has set a new benchmark in railway infrastructure management.

With the commissioning of SUGAMRAIL, Western Railway has reaffirmed its commitment to adopting intelligent digital solutions for safer, smarter and accountable railway operations. The platform stands as a model of innovation designed to address evolving demands in public service delivery.