Railways exploring UTS on mobiles

At present UTS application is functional through face-to-face ticketing counters, outsourced ticketing terminals and automated ticket vending machines

New Delhi: Indian Railways and Centre for Railways Information System (CRIS) are exploring the possibility of implementing Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) using mobile handsets.

“Subscribers of Mobile Phones is constantly increasing and to explore the possibility of providing ticketing solution through mobile phones we have called for expression of intrest (EoI) for UTS project to get a clear picture of the feasibility and the way forward,” CRIS Chief System Manager Monica Malhotra said.

She said at present CRIS cannot say much about the project but once EoI stage is over the way forward would be clear.

At present UTS application is functional through face-to-face ticketing counters, outsourced ticketing terminals and automated ticket vending machines.

These multiple interfaces have been developed primarily to extend ticketing convenience to the end-user and also to reduce the queue lengths on the railway stations.

But in reality despite the proliferation of ticketing counters the queuing problem has not been fully resolved.

This is primarily because of the fact that the passenger traveling on the unreserved segment generally reaches the station just prior to the departure time of the train. Peak hours therefore can be extremely crowded.

With mobile UTS application railways are looking at a win-win situation for the passenger and the Railways in terms of easier ticketing solutions that can lead to higher revenues.

As per the Expression of Interest (EoI) the desirable features of a mobile ticket solution will be that the user should be allowed to generate the Ticket by interfacing with the mobile phone from any physical location, for travel between a specified origin and destination point, The ticket so generated should be a smart image which should not explode into a full blown ticket till it is validated before the Journey is commenced.

EoI also stresses on features like ‘Self Destruction’, that is as soon as the validity period expires the Ticket Image should get deleted and the application so developed should make sure that it is compatible with even low-end phone so that maximum coverage is achieved.

http://www.igovernment.in/site/railways-exploring-uts-mobiles-37204