Transportation: Reserving the Unreserved

A network spanning over 6,000 stations ferrying a whopping 17 mn passengers everyday, Indian Railways no wonder is one of world's largest railway network. However as is the case in India, only 1 mn passengers traveling have confirmed seats while the remaining (16 mn) travel without confirmed seats. Therefore the Indian Railways needed a solution to end its travails of mounting losses to the exchequer and centralize the purchase and management of unreserved tickets.

Tickets for All

Therefore the Indian Railways deployed the Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS), which was developed and implemented by the Centre for Railways Information Systems (CRIS). Under the new system, 1.5 crore passengers are issued tickets on a daily basis through counters spread across 2,500 locations across the country.

In addition, 350 automatic ticket vending machines have also been installed to ease out the rush at the booking counters. One of the highlights of the solution is that it allows for continued ticketing service even in the case of unavailability of a back-end infrastructure.

Besides, the Indian Railways has also introduced a new technology of Automated Ticket Vending Machines (ATVM) in order to reduce the queue length at the booking counters.

These kiosks embedded with Sybase SQL to be used anywhere along with the use of RFID smart cards have enabled customers to buy tickets through a user-friendly application supporting regional languages (in addition to English and Hindi). Thus facilitating the issuance of tickets without any human interaction.

Management

Post the deployment, the transaction time for issuance of tickets has been minimized to less than 20 sec/ticket. The UTS also enables advance booking and cancellation of unreserved tickets from any station. Besides passengers can also book tickets anytime, anywhere, thus minimizing the possibilities of manipulation and malpractice. On the control front, UTS has enabled centralized control for monitoring and auditing to ensure accounting of the tickets sold across all railway zones.

Also, UTS sustains the growth in passengers without any growth in the staff fare structure, destination, and other database updates. The solution created by CRIS handles 60% of the Indian Railways' total unreserved traffic, yielding an average revenue of about '4.7 mn/day. Passengers can now immediately buy an unreserved return ticket for any of the 8,520 trains that cover about 63,000 km track.