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Sci Tech
Wooing passengers with convenience
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Railways is using bank's ATMs to issue tickets and hopes to hook passengers into using the Net to book tickets. It has already made a foray into using smart card technology.
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Booking tickets through Internet and using ATMs to issue tickets may make long queues at reservations counters at thing of the past. Pic by S.R. Raghunathan
FERRYING NEARLY 13 million passengers a day in 8500 trains — that is the Indian Railways for your records. And when this behemoth adopts the latest technology there can be no stopping it.
In a week's time travelling ticket examiners in ten trains will be armed with a smart card (SC) and a hand held SC reader. Called "mobile ticketing," ticket examiners will typically use this facility to issue tickets on board the train. To start with the pilot project will restrict itself to issuing tickets to those wanting to extend their journey or desiring to change the class of travel to name a few.
For the first time Mumbai suburban passengers will be able to load their season tickets onto a smart card when the facility becomes available in another 15 days time. Already smart cards are used to load any amount for travelling in Mumbai local trains.
Mobile ticketing closely follows railways' foray into utilizing Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) to issue season tickets. Starting June this year, Railways had started issuing season tickets at State Bank of India's ATM located at V.T. station. More number of ATMs would be made available for the said purpose when SBI server is connected to Railways' server. That is not all.
Indian Railways is negotiating with nine other banks to offer similar ticket vending through ATMs. The Railways server based in Mumbai can serve the Central and Western railways, while the server recently inaugurated in Delhi can serve the Northern and Northeastern Railways. "We intend installing similar servers in Chennai, Howrah and Hyderabad. And when this happens the entire country will be covered," a senior Railway official said. "And there will be thousands of ATMs capable of issuing season tickets." This is one of the instances where ATM has been used for purposes other than transacting cash and banking related activities.
The unreserved ticketing system was recently inaugurated in Delhi and will soon come up in Howrah. Chennai would also have a similar facility in four months' time. The plan is to have a server in the main ticket booking facility and have several terminals spread around the city.
Ticket vending through ATMs closely follows the Internet initiative of the railways. In a span of 15 days in August ticket booking through Internet (www.indianrailways.gov.in) for reserved tickets was inaugurated in Delhi and then in Chennai. Long queues for booking tickets may soon be a thing of the past in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai and Howrah too when booking through Internet becomes a reality in three months' time according to the official. Plans are afoot to throw open this facility for reserving unreserved tickets too.
Delivery of tickets to start with is being done at the passenger's doorstep for a price. But Railways would soon be able to use ATMs for printing the tickets once they are booked through Internet. The next stage would be when the ticket is booked on Internet and ticket instead of being printed is downloaded on to a smart card connected to computers. Ticket examiners armed with smart card readers will be able to check the card for details.
A futuristic scheme that is under consideration is not to rely on tickets at all. Sounds audacious? "Why a ticket when a passenger can carry some sort of identity card like a passport and the password given to him while booking the ticket," the official asked.
The focus right now is to alleviate the suffering of unreserved passengers. If this defies logic for the layman, the reason is quite simple and obvious for the railway authorities. Nearly 12 million passengers a day are the underprivileged unreserved travellers. Of this seven million are the suburban train passengers. This is the priority area for Railways as only 1000 of the 8500 trains are reserved. The revenue from season tickets alone amounts to Rs1600 crore a year.
Booking tickets using a credit card has not taken off the way Railways wanted. The main hitch has being the service charge that the passenger needs to shell out and the long time taken for getting a refund when a ticket is cancelled. According to the credit card norms, the service charge of 2.75 per cent is borne by the merchant and not the customer.
Would Internet booking face the same fate especially with the fear of revealing credit card number while transacting over the net looming large in the customers' mind? "Not likely" according to him. For one, the user has to first get registered. Though a free registration, this allows the Railways to know the background of the customer. "The possibility of leakage is nil," he said, "as all transactions are encrypted and the user is straight away connected to ICICI payment gateway."
The proof of customers' acceptance of Internet can be gauged by the number of registered users. For the record there are 40,000 registered users and the number of tickets issued has shot up to 600 tickets a day (up from 200/day) valued at Rs10 lakh in a span of nearly one-and-half months. Even querying information through Internet has reached an all time high of 1.3 million hits a day.
As part of the 150 years celebration, Indian Railways has many more schemes up its sleeves. Railways were the first to introduce computers way back in 1985 (for booking tickets) and all other institutions followed suit. The railways appear to be doing an encore this time with introduction of smart card technology and utilising ATMs to its advantage.
R. Prasad
Recently in New Delhi
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