?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.
On the other hand, if the analysis shows that it is the General Pool which needs more tickets, and the Roadside quota is not used up sufficiently, then it would be redistributed accordingly. The ODAs would be carried out for every ticketing season to meet any changes in ticket booking trends. For instance, booking trends in the summer season tend to be different, with more travellers buying tickets for cooler climes or coastal cities. Similarly there is a rush for railway tickets during the festival season as well.
While there is still some time for the ODAs to be carried out for all trains, as the Railway Board is still finalising some of the modalities, the experiment has paid off in a pilot project. The Western Railway recently carried out such a study of booking trends for 30 trains originating from its zone. The result surpassed expectations. After reviewing the quotas based on the analysis, the earning from these trains shot up by two and a half to three times.
For Indian Railways, this may just prove to be doubly lucky. Not only would it increase passenger convenience by easing ticketing problems, an area it has been working on consistently, it would also help it increase its falling passenger earnings. In 2007-08, railway earnings from passenger segment however were lower than the revised estimate of Rs 20,075 crore and it earned substantially less revenue amounting to Rs 19,836.66 crore. The total number of passengers it carried in the fiscal was also lower at 6,678.91 million than the RE of 6,688.28 million.
For 2008-09, the railways have set a target of earning Rs 21,681 crore from the segment and ferrying 7,056.38 million passengers. According to figures released by the ministry on Wednesday, railways in the first month of this fiscal has earned Rs 1,793.98 crore compared to Rs 1616.69 crore in April 2007, an increase of a mere 10.97%. It carried about 572.64 million passengers during the month, a rise of 6.36% compared to the 538.42 million passengers it transported in April 2007.
While it may be too early to comment on the railways? financial future for 2008-09, the initial trends seem to reveal that the slowdown in the passenger earnings witnessed last fiscal will continue into this fiscal as well. The move is also well in tandem with the railway ministry?s efforts to improve passenger amenities and its various ticketing related initiatives. The railways? e-ticketing facility has already proven to be very successful, for which it has also tied up with Internet Service Providers, petrol pumps and the department of posts. The ministry has also introduced automatic ticket vending machines on major stations to cut down on queues at reservation centres. On the anvil is a plan to allow booking of tickets through mobile phones. The railways? plan to redesignate ticket quotas would also curb the powers and income of many of the railway TTs (or travelling ticket examiners) who often give out vacant berths to passengers with waitlisted tickets in return for some money. ?That was not really an objective when we began this programme, but yes, it will be a welcome change,? a railway official said.