Indian railways Launches Mobile App for Paperless Unreserved Ticketing

New Delhi, India, 23 April, 2015 - Fulfilling yet another commitment of the Railway Budget 2015-16 the Minister of Railways Shri Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu launched Mobile Application for Paperless Unreserved Ticketing through video conferencing on Egmore–Tambaram Suburban Section of Chennai at a function on 23 April,2015. 

This is a pilot project covering 15 stations in Southern Railway and will be extended to entire country in phases. 

Referring his Railway Budget announcement the Railway Minister said that for the passenger, the Indian Railways is committed to ‘Operation Five Minutes’ – that is, purchase of an unreserved ticket within five minutes and today’s launching of Paperless Unreserved Mobile Ticket is the first step in this area. He said that it will allow the passenger to buy a ticket on the move and allow him or her to board the train with the ticket secured on his or her mobile phone, without any need for printing the ticket. 

Developed by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) "utsonmobile" – the paperless unreserved ticketing feature in mobile application aims to eliminate the need for printing of unreserved tickets. Payment for the ticket is done through a feature in the app called 'railway wallet'.

Member Traffic Railway Board Shri Ajay Shukla said that the Unreserved Ticketing System is an important revenue generating system developed by CRIS. He said that nearly two crore passengers obtain unreserved tickets daily through nearly 11470 counters and 5836 locations generating about Rs. 52 crore of revenue per day. He congratulated CRIS for successfully developing Application App for paperless unreserved ticketing system on Indian Railways.

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.- he added

"It is a big opportunity for Southern Railway. The railway board has inaugurated mobile ticketing. For those who do not get confirmed tickets, they can book their tickets through their mobile phones. At the moment they can travel from Egmore to Tambram," said CPI (M) member TK Rengarajan.

"It will be extended further. This is a great help to the ordinary passenger and office goers. We must congratulate the railway", he added.

The Indian Railways Data centre will be a new building in the premises of existing CRIS office. Indian Railways depends heavily on Information Technology for its customer facing commercial activities, train operations, and internal management. Critical IT applications run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, throughout the year, to support Railway operations. These applications cannot be shut down for even a minute on account of any outage of power or cooling.