Research Design and Standards Organisation (RDSO), a research arm of Indian Railways, has been approaching the industry through vendor meets organised in various cities, in order to improve the ease of doing business with Indian Railways.
Senior officials of the RDSO have been interacting with prospective vendors, to educate them about the features and to explain the ease of using the new online vendor registration system.
The first such vendor meet in coordination with Laghu Udyog Bharti, Rajkot was organised on 24 January 2018 at Rajkot in which queries / doubts from the around 200 vendors present were resolved on the spot by senior officials in a question-answer session.
Since then vendor meets have been held at various other cities such as Faridabad, Ludhiana, Sahibabad, Coimbatore, Pune, Noida, Kanpur, Jamshedpur, between 22 February and 6 April.
More such meets are planned in April and May 2018 at seven more places, including Raipur (23 April), Patna (24 April), Jaipur (25 April), Kolkata (27 April) and Mumbai (4 May), an RDSO release stated.
These vendor meets have helped increase the number of prospective vendor applications for fresh registration for RDSO items from about 25 (average) per month earlier to 60 (average) per month now.
Between 1 November 2017 and 16 March 2018 RDSO has received 1,231 vendor account registration applications, received payments in 208 cases while 27 vendors were delisted, the release adds.