Bharti dig at Indian Railways

By Venkatachari Jagannathan | 08 Sep 2003

Chennai: For journalists, bashing or taking a dig at government/public sector units (PSU) is a favourite past time. Because they do not generally retaliate like the private sector companies — like refusing to give advertisements or filing court cases.

But now the private sector companies have started defaming the public sector in a brazen manner. How else would you describe the press release issued by Bharti Telenet, the basic telephony service provider in Chennai and Bangalore, announcing the introduction of interactive voice response service (IVRS)/railway enquiry service based on speech recognition technology?

Explaining how the enquiry service works, the company''s press release had an imaginary dialogue flow. After the initial pleasantries the dialogue answers an enquiry about Pandian Express as: "The train 6718, Madurai Chennai Pandiyan Express is scheduled to arrive Chennai Egmore at 6 am, has left Tambaram at 05.40 am with a delay of 20 minutes, and is expected to arrive at 6.20 am."

The crux of the message is that the train is running late by 20 minutes. Trains running late in India are not new. It is equally true that many trains do run on time or reach their destination earlier than their scheduled time.

The question is, is it ethical for Bharti Telenet to send out a release that projects a negative image about another commercial organisation while highlighting its own service?