Of the more than 25 million passengers that travel daily on the Indian Railways, 53% are suburban passengers. Another 32% passengers travel unreserved in the “general” class. Tickets for these 21 million passengers journeys a day are provided by the computerised Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) of the Indian Railways.
A majority of the suburban journeys are covered by Monthly Season Tickets (MST). The remaining suburban tickets, and all non-suburban unreserved tickets, are single-use Journey Tickets.
The Indian Railways sells MST and Journey Tickets through the following modes:
- Thin Client based Unreserved Ticketing System, that are capable of working offline.
- Dumb Terminal based Unreserved Ticketing System. This is a server based system that requires a network connection to operate.
- Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVM), which are passenger operated kiosks that accept contactless smart cards.
- Thin Client based Smart Card Recharge terminals, which can dispense and recharge ATVM smart cards, apart from selling UTS tickets.
- Dumb Terminal based Jan Sadharan Ticket Booking Seva (JTBS) counters, which are run by entrepreneurs outside the Railways premises.
The 21 million unreserved journeys a day bring in a daily revenue of ₹17 crores. However, the average revenue per ticket is only ₹8.08. Of this, the average revenue per suburban ticket is even lower at ₹4.40. Therefore, it is of vital importance that:
- The cost of dispensing each ticket is kept as low as possible.
- The time taken per transaction is very low. This not only reduces cost per ticket, it also improves the experience of the passengers. Often passengers prefer bus journeys because it is easier to purchase tickets.
- There should be multiple outlets for the passenger to buy tickets, so that the ticket purchase experience is easy. Today tickets are sold through UTS counters, ATVM machines and JTBS counters.
Thinvent has been working closely with the UTS team at CRIS to ensure development of new and advanced technologies for unreserved ticket sale. Our constant endeavour is to reduce transaction time, cost and fraud, while improving the overall passenger experience.