28-05-2025
CDTPA plea to Railways on issuance of quick ticket booking
The Cauvery Delta Train Passengers Association (CDTPA) has exhorted the Southern Railway to ensure quick current ticket issuance to the travellers during peak hours at the railway stations.
Highlighting the plight of current ticket booking passengers, the Association secretary V. Jeevakumar said that the ticket booking counter staff insist for current ticket booking through online payment methods during both peak and lean hours of traffic.
However, in districts like Thanjavur and other delta districts, commuters hail from rural areas and have yet to grasp the skill to operate the mobile applications quickly. Hence, on several occasions they were unable to catch the trains.
At the same time, the delay to complete the process during morning and evening peak hours has a cascading effect on the passengers standing in the line who were aware of operating such mobile applications, he claimed.
Such being the case, the Association called upon the Southern Railway to increase or earmark booking counters exclusively for cash booking during peak hours for the benefit of non-mobile application technology savvy commuters.
He also exhorted the Indian Railways, through the Southern Railway, to weed out the problems faced by the uses of the mobile application - Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) – in booking tickets at the eleventh hour, particularly those undertaking short distance travels.
At present, a mobile UTS user could not book unreserved ticket if he or she was 'in the vicinity' of the railway track which means the user was barred from using the application while in the station premises or even at a distance of 100 metres away from the railway track.
If the railway authorities claim that such restriction was imposed to avoid ticket-less travelling by the commuter until he reaches his or her destination, the apprehension of the railways that a commuter might cheat the organisation could very well be surmounted with the help of real-time technology to assess the exact location of the passenger, whether the person was moving on the track, at the time of attempting to book a ticket and comparing the time of booking with the schedule of trains available with the railways.
By including this verification process in the mobile application, the 'ticket-less travellers' could be discourage to embark on such travels, he added.
