Ticket booking for Mumbai Suburban railways can be done through mobile app now

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu has launched paperless tickets for Mumbai Subrurban. This service is being rolled out on the Churchgate – Dhanu Road Suburban Section of Western Railway covering 35 stations over 123 kms. distance.

How does the paperless ticket system work?

For paperless ticketing, GPS co-ordinates of suburban railway tracks on the Churchgate – Dhanu Road Suburban Section, plus 30 meters on either side of the tracks have been earmarked as Geo-Fencing area within which no ticket booking is allowed in order to ensure that passengers have ticket before commencing the journey.

To eliminate the need for printing of Unreserved Tickets, Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) has developed a paperless ticketing feature in mobile application “UTS” on Android and Windows platforms.

The application provides necessary on-screen alerts to guide the passenger during the booking process. Payment for the ticket is done through the “Railway Wallet” feature. After booking the ticket, the passenger will get the ticket confirmation screen which contains limited information of the ticket. The paperless journey ticket will be stored in the local mobile application database in the encrypted form which cannot be tampered with.

The passenger has to start the journey within 1 hour as per policy for suburban sections. Ticket booked in paperless mode cannot be cancelled in order to prevent claiming of refund after travel.

The ticket has distinct colour scheme everyday and it is embedded with Quick Response (QR) code. It cannot be forwarded to another mobile or edited or printed. The old invalid tickets will be removed from the mobile device through the sync feature in the app.

For the purpose of ticket checking, the application has various features such as colour scheme, show ticket features, secret code of the day, booking time of the ticket and scrolling of legend “IR UNRESERVED TICKETING”. In case of mobile in disconnected mode, it will be checked through QR Code.

Before Mumbai, the paperless unreserved ticketing system was introduced between Egmore and Tambaram suburban sections in Chennai on a trial basis and will perhaps be implemented in other metros also in phased manner.

The railway minister has also launched SMS-based destination alert service for Rajdhani and Duronto trains and an e-ticketing portal in Hindi.

Source: CIOL.com