Indian Railways Ticketing – IS for common man

This was supposed to be my first longest travel on Indian Railways. It just took twenty minutes for me to book tickets from Bangalore to Goa online.

I was waiting listed with WL120. My friends assured me I will get confirmed as there is one more week for the travel. What surprised me was I never

went back to the site http://www.irctc.co.in to check if my seat got confirmed.

Fairy-Queen (1855) is a locomotive of 1855, the days before the use of Electricity, Telegraph, Telephone, Wireless, Steel etc.Now, the Fairy Queen

is the oldest one of its kind in working condition after almost 150 years. Get more details from http://www.railmuseum.org/new_nrm/index.htm

All that I did was sending SMS to 676747. At last on penultimate day I got the reply SMS with confirmation. I was surprised with the response

time of my query to PRS (passenger reservation system). As soon as I pressed send button and came out of Inbox; I heard my mobile beeping with

the latest status. Very much less than 2 seconds. I decided to dig deep into their system as soon as I return from Goa.

CRIS (http://cris.org.in)

Centre for Railway Information Systems was established by Ministry of Railways in 1986 to handle all the IS related activities in Indian Railways. It

started functioning from July 1987 as an autonomous society. CRIS is responsible for the projects like

CONCERT - Country-wide Network for Computerized Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing

FOIS Freight Operations Information Systems

NTES National Train Enquiry System

PRS - Passenger Reservation System

Ticketing

Indian Railways is the world’s second largest railway, with 6853 stations, 63,028 KM of track, 37,840 passenger coaches. Carrying 4.83 billion of

passengers annually and 492 million tons of goods. Around 11 million travels climb the train everyday into one of its 8,520 trains. Their journey can

Indian Postal Service issued this stamp in

2002 to mark 150 years of Indian Railways.

start anywhere in India and can end anywhere within 6853 stations. The scope of the project can be estimated from this requirement.

There were several versions of PRS which went into production failed under this huge demand. These systems were limited to booking the tickets

with in their area. The version 3 of the PRS called Impress developed in 1990 also fell short of the growing expectations. At last there was a

requirement for the software with networking capabilities. On April 1999 a system was introduced networking all the five (Chennai, Secunderabad,

New Delhi, Kolkatta, Mumbai) PRS nodes across the country. Now anywhere to anywhere ticketing was possible. The whole network was called

CONCERT.

In order facilitate the booking and enquiry many interfaces were introduced like Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS), Passenger Operated

Enquiry Services, Online (Internet) booking and enquiry, SMS (mobile) booking and PNR enquiry.

Its internet enquiry site www.indiarail.gov.in receives 4.5 million hits per day during a busy day. The site has 3 Alpha DS-20 servers and 7

webservers. And 2 Proliant servers (Red Hat 7.3) act as Firewall with checkpoint software. It has Redhat Linux ES based Prolient server acting as

management server and similar server with Redhat Linux 7.3 acting as DNS. The site is operational since 15 August 2002. Gets usually 30,00,000 hits

per day, And about 300,000 SMS enquiries per month.

Unreserved ticketing systems consitues the biggest component of total ticketing. UTS is the complete solution to provide computerised

unreserved tickets. It includes the terminal at the stations, automatic vendor machines, hand held terminals etc.

Speaking on the occasion of inaguration, Sh.Nitish Kumar said that the UTS will provide the facility to purchase Unreserved Ticket 3 days in advance

of the date of journey. A passenger can buy a ticket for any destination from the UTS counter for all such destinations which are served by that

station. The cancellation of tickets has also been simplified. Passengers can cancel their tickets one day in advance of the journey from any

station provided with a UTS counter. On the day of journey, the ticket can be cancelled from station from which the journey was to commence.

Hon’ble Minister further apprised that more than 1.2 crore passengers travel in unreserved coaches and trains and thus form the bulk of rail users.

This facility was initially provided at 10 stations of Delhi area in the first stage of UTS as a pilot project on 15 August 2002. Another 13 stations of

Delhi area were provided with UTS counters in the second stage on 2nd Oct, 2002. It has now been extended in an integrated manner to stations

at Amritsar, Jallandhar City, Ludhiana Cantt., Saharanpur, Moradabad, Bareilly, Lucknow and Varanasi Cantt. stations, completing the second phase

of installation of UTS. With this inauguration the Amritsar-Varanasi route has been covered by the UTS technology from today. This will provide

great convenience to lakhs of passengers from the State of Punjab , Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

The latest technologies being eTicketing and SMS booking. Now you can buy the tickets until the last 4 hours online using iTicketing. Buy the

tickets online, take a print and travel with an identity card. The SMS booking allows you to book the tickets using the mobile phone. If the user is

the registered user of http://www.irctc.co.in/ , he can book the tickets using the mobile phone, which is easy isn’t it? Indian Railways is the one

where I have seen the biigested IT infracture deployed for common man. Its truely IT working for common man.

SMS booking.
Now you can book the tickets on mobile. See the url for

details.

eTicketing
To avail this service, the user can log on to www.irctc.co.in and book his ticket on the Internet just like any normal booking, and selecting ‘e-

Ticket’ in the Plan My Travel page. The user has to give the photo identity card details of any one of the passengers, while booking the ticket. On

confirmation of his booking, the user can take a print of the Electronic Reservation Slip (ERS) and can perform the journey with the ERS and the

photo identity card.

SMS-PNR status
Send PNR to 676747