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Railway booking technology provider is looking at a pan-India card that can be used across all the metro rail services in the country. The aim is to make usage of the cards inter-operable on all railway services in future. A central clearing-house would need to be set up for a pan-India card.
Managing Director of Centre for Rail Information Systems (CRIS), VA Chopra said, "Automated ticket vending ticketing has been tried out in Mumbai suburban area, Chennai and Hyderabad on the automatic ticket vending machines (ATVMs). CRIS has also done the ticketing system for the Kolkata Metro using RFID-based tokens and card tickets."
"The portal's idea came for a single website for entry into Indian Railways. We are already handling the back-end services for irctc.co.in. There are lots of complications in e-commerce. The software, which we made, was not designed for the level of traffic. We had estimated 20% growth every year based on IRCTC levels. But when we went online, everyone wanted to register." he told ET.
Of all rail tickets sold in the country, unreserved segment accounts for 85-90%. They are now working on mobile phone-based unreserved ticket booking. It will be possible to board the train without a printout of the ticket in future.
The unreserved ticketing system started in 2002 with about 125 stations. These tickets are sold for a timeframe of 24 hours and a passenger has the option of taking any train during that time.
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