Digital future
There is a huge focus on digitalisation across the business world. How does Jain look at it in the context of GE Transportation? "GE Transportation today offers a portfolio of digital solutions which can be applied to rail operations, rail yards, ports and terminals. These solutions either improve the asset performance or optimize a network by making it more intelligent or just improve visibility and analytics across a system. This helps improve asset utilisation, reduces costs and improves throughput of the system leading to lower operating ratio," Jain shares. Interestingly, GE today tracks and monitors over 17000 locomotives and through its diagnostics and analytics tools, helps railways across the world achieve high levels of reliability and availability.
The locomotives being delivered to Indian Railways have been digitally enabled to allow remote monitoring and diagnostics. "These locomotives have also been pre-wired to install additional digital train performance solutions in future like Locotrol for multi-loco operation to run longer trains," Jain adds.

Focus on skill development
Locomotive manufacturing and service operations are complex processes requiring specialised skill sets and it is therefore important to hire and retain talent at remote sites. "GE has been committed towards the skill development initiatives of the Government of India and therefore has worked with 16 government diploma institutes in the region to induct 90 diploma graduates for the early career roles from institutes. Specific emphasis was also laid down on creating diversity and inducting women in our teams. We then invested on training and development of these diploma graduates to impart specialised skills which included advanced engineering skills, exposure to manufacturing processes along with soft skills," Jain says.
GE Transportation is also investing in partnership with government institutes for offering specialised training in the fields of painting, welding etc., which will help in skill development and job-creation for the youth in the region.
"It is worth mentioning that the Principal of one of the Polytechnics in Patna, who recently met her students after they had completed our training, was pleasantly surprised at her students' new-found confidence. She complimented us on the significant difference she saw in the girls and the larger impact these girls would create as role models in their communities by pursuing technical course and getting jobs and standing on their own. Hearing such feedback gives us a sense of purpose that our project is beyond building locomotives," Jain shares with pride. 

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