Mobile device to inform passengers on occupancy

The next fiscal may see ticket checkers in trains armed with a hand-held device, which would provide information about the exact occupancy status of a particular train in advance to all forthcoming stations on its route.

The railway ministry is planning to start a pilot project from April next year, wherein it would be introducing a mobile phone like hand-held device to ticket checkers across major trains. The aim is to provide passengers waiting in en route stations with exact details about the occupancy of coaches in advance.

The Rs 5 crore (Rs 50 million) plan would be funded via the general managers' offices of all the zones across the country. The USP of this device would be that it would be connected to the passenger reservation system of all the stations.

Once a train leaves its originating station, the ticket checker would feed in the occupancy details which would be put into PRS of all en route stations through the main station's server.

This way, wait-listed or unconfirmed passengers at en route stations would be able to get a clear idea about the occupancy status of the arriving train.

The device will have a printer attached to it, to give a print out of a receipt, once a ticket is issued to a newly confirmed passenger. Details of all such transactions would be directly recorded with the PRS of all stations, thus negating any possibility of fraud.

Currently, these devices are being used on Delhi-Lucknow and Delhi-Amritsar routes, as part of a trial run. Ministry sources said that on an experimental basis, the ministry had purchased devices worth Rs 50 lakh (Rs 5 million) earlier this year, which are being used on the aforementioned routes for the last three months. The ticket checkers on these routes had undergone a training to learn the usage of these devices. The device costs around Rs 30,000.

The ministry is also talking to various companies to buy these devices and a decision is likely to be finalised soon. However, a senior official said that it would be by the end of the 11th Plan that ticket checkers across all trains in the country would be able to use the device.