Revamp of railway ticket quota system to ease journey

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“Will it, won’t it?” This last-minute suspense over the confirmation of your railway tickets even as your bags are packed for that holiday or business trip is set to ease substantially. The railway ministry is planning a complete revamp of its reservation system by re-designating the ticket quotas used for booking tickets.

There are three main types of quotas for booking and reserving the tickets of the 12 million people who travel by Indian Railways every day. The General Quota, used at the originating and the destination stations is the central pool and most of the tickets are booked under it. Then there are the Road Side Quotas or the Remote Location Quotas, which are used for booking and reserving tickets from intermediate stations. The Emergency Quota is used for confirming waitlisted tickets in case of cancellations.

The railway ministry is now reviewing this system of quotas and re-designating the number of tickets in each quota for every train depending on ticket booking trends. The Centre for Railway Information Systems is conducting an origin destination analysis (ODA) to study the booking patterns for each train. “The analysis will let us know which are the main stations from where tickets are booked for each train and we will redistribute the quota accordingly,” a Rail Bhawan official involved in the exercise said.

So for instance if the ODA for a train running from Ahmedabad to Mumbai via Surat and Vadodara reveals that more tickets are being booked for the journey between Surat and Vadodara, the Roadside Quota would be increased and the General Quota would be cut down proportionately.

The quota revamp would ensure that passengers at such intermediate stations who end up getting a waitlisted ticket even though half the seats in the train remain unreserved, as not enough tickets are booked under the general quota, the official said. As a result of such ticketing discrepancies, many trains run half empty and make losses, he added.