66 Review of Professional Management, Volume 13, Issue 2 (July-December-2015) Determinants of Passengers Perception about Service Quality through 5S- A Study on I ndian Railways Harpreet Singh*, Simerjeet Singh Bawa** Abstract Indian Railway is the lifeline of the country being the cheapest and comfortable mode of travelling especially for long distance. This industry being in the service sector, needs to give utmost attention for providing quality service to millions of Indian . Maintaining consistently a high quality of service is a challenge for any organisation. For service producing firms, it is essential to organize every aspect of business keeping in mind to serve the customer best. In this study, an effort has been made to understand the concept of 5S- a methodology-Japanese quality standard- to study the level of the customer satisfaction. This methodology is used to analyse the level of the customer satisfaction for Indian Railways through quantitative analysis. Key words : Indian Railways, Service Quality, Customer Satisfaction, 5S Framework *Dr. Harpreet Singh Professor & Director, A. S. Group of Institutions, Khanna Punjab **Mr. Simerjeet Singh Bawa Assistant Professor, Gyan Jyoti Group of Institute, Rajpura Patiala, Punjab I ntroduction 161 years old Indian Railway Services have the largest train networks in Asia. It is world’s largest railway system under a single management and one of the most popular mode of travelling in India. Indian Railways have 115,000 kilometres of total track over a route of 65,000 kilometres and 7,500 stations. Most of Indian population largely relies on railways for their journey due to convenience of connectivity and its low cost of commuting. With an extensive networks spread across the country, Indian Railways plays a key role in the social and economic development of India. This is indeed the lifeline of the country . Vanniarajan and Stephen (2008) identified that according to the customer attributes such as reliability, assurance, empathy, tangibles, and responsiveness are significant service quality of Indian Railways. Though Indian Rail Services are in the public sector and managed by one monolithic management system under Ministry of Railways, it faces competition from road and air transport facilities and their effective modernization. Service Quality has been recognised as a powerful weapon and the form of differentiation in this era of competition. As service quality is the decisive factor for any service organization to gain competitive advantage, Railways’ Management needs to improve this continuously. In reality the quality of a service may be largely invisible to the customer and perception of service delivery is influenced disproportionately by the manner of treatment at the point of contact. The challenge of this industry is to bring together various facets of