Railways to introduce ticket punching system to enter or exit any Railway Station in India
Rail News 17 Feb 2014
Free riders will now have to cough up the fare as Indian Railways will soon go the Delhi Metro way. Passengers will be required to punch their train tickets to enter or exit any railway station. Indian Railways, which loses over Rs 1,000 crore every year due to ticketless travel, is planning to start first trials of the new system by March at Delhi’s Anand Vihar and Uttarakhand’s Kathgodam Railway Stations.
The railways has decided to put automatic entry and exit gates at both the stations to ensure that only passengers having a valid ticket can enter or exit the stations. These automatic gates would be equipped with ticket reader and scanner and it would be mandatory for passengers to punch their tickets.
The Indian Railways has been struggling to check the ticketless travel on its 63,000km network and is banking on the use of technology to make up for the revenue loss. The situation can be assessed from the fact that Indian Railways booked over 70 lakh people and recovered Rs 289 crore during July-December 2013.
“We have been struggling to find a solution to curb ticketless travel in trains. If I want to check tickets, I need more and more ticket checking staff but we have to keep in mind that the cost of staff versus the cost I recover from ticket checking has to have some correlation,” said Member of Railway Board (Traffic) D P Pande.
Pande said after carrying out feasibility study it was decided that technology could be used to do the same. “This is practised world over and now we want to see how it has to be done here. If I allow nobody who doesn’t have a valid ticket to enter the station … so is it technically feasible and acceptable to public at large and what happens to children, elderly and handicapped, all has to be taken into account,” he said.
Indian Railways plan to roll out the scheme by March end initially at two stations—Anand Vihar and Kathgodam—which are dead end stations from where passengers can travel only in one direction.
“We will carry out first trials and see how tickets get read and in what span of time. Besides we need to check ticket validity and if it is the same passenger that boards the train,” he said.
On feasibility of the system in a rail network used by over 1.3 crore people every day, Pande said: “It happens at all airports so why can’t we do it.”
The Indian Railways has also decided to set up coin-operated automatic ticket vending machines at railways stations so that passengers don’t have to wait in long queues at counters to get tickets.
With zero fare hike in the interim budget, the Indian Railways is banking upon carrying more passengers and freight to increase its revenue. According to railways, checking ticketless travel when it plans to carry more passengers is important to meet the revenue target of Rs 1.6 lakh crore in the Financial Year 2014-15.
Comments
Post a Comment