KOZHIKODE: E-ticketing constitutes a substantial part of railway ticket booking in the state as around 40 percentage of seat reservations have now been made online. While the percentage of online ticket booking in Kochi is far above national average, Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode stands almost at par with the national figure. “The total reserved accommodation available in railways in a day comes around 10 lakh. On an average, around 28 per cent of the reservations are made through online. Of these, 80 per cent of the e-ticketing are made in metro cities. The percentage of online booking in Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Kozhikode are 36, 28 and 25, respectively,” a top official of the Southern Railway told Express. However, according to the official, there exists certain flaws in the existing e-ticketing system which cause inconvenience to the public and thereby preventing the public from booking tickets online. “A major problem raised by the passengers is regarding the lack of permission to board the train with an unconfirmed e-ticket. While passengers having unconfirmed tickets reserved through normal reservation process are allowed to board the train, unconfirmed tickets booked online automatically gets cancelled once chart is prepared and passengers are not allowed to entrain as there are chances for misuse. This prevents people from booking tickets online,” he said. Besides, the website of the IRCTC is not fool proof and there is widespread misuse of online booking of tickets in emergency quota by agents in connivance with the clerks in the reservation centres. “Recently, a group of agents in Lucknow developed a software using which people can book tickets while the server of the IRCTC is switched off. Another major misuse is in booking tickets in emergency quota. Agents in collusion with the booking clerks used to block all tickets in emergency quota and were later sold at a high premium. Earlier, the agents used to block all the tickets when reservation in emergency quota begins. To prevent this misuse, agents are now given access to websiteonly after an hour of the commencement of booking,” he said. Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Railways, has now embarked on the mission to develop a new website which provides fool proof service. “The present software was also developed by CRIS but it took part in the tender procedure with the financial assistance from IRCTC. Once the new website is developed, e-ticketing will be withdrawn from the IRCTC,” the official said.
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