Railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Tuesday launched the RailOne app that will enable the booking of unreserved tickets besides offering services like live train tracking, grievance redressal and e-catering.
Developed by the railways tech arm CRIS, the RailOne app has been authorised by IRCTC to book unreserved tickets even as the reserved tickets will continue to be offered by IRCTC.
The minister said that the CRIS will handle the unreserved tickets which were sold through the counters. “The UTS app, an online service launched in the past for unreserved tickets, didn’t get enough response,” he said.
The unreserved tickets are currently sold through physical counters, ticket vending machines and the UTS app. Within this, the share of physical counters is the highest but the railways is keen on improving the “online” share. On the other hand, the IRCTC controls over 80% market share in the reserved category. To promote higher usage, the train tickets and platform tickets will be sold at a 3% discount on the new app.
Vaishnaw said that CRIS operates several mobile applications to serve different railway-related needs, however, the time has to come to build a unified architecture. “The common architecture will ease the future growth of the transporter,” he said. CRIS has developed a number of public-centric mobile apps such as UTS, RailConnect, NTES, Rail Madad, Rail Sugam, CoachMitra, Rail Rajbhasha, etc.
The minister also said that the railways must adopt new technologies that are being used in other major railway systems, metros, and RRTS (regional rapid transit system). “The CRIS must adopt the best cybersecurity standards available globally, especially for the network routers, which is the most vulnerable point. Today, there are many sovereign clouds in the country so you don’t have to do everything in-house. You can work with the best services providers,” Vaishnaw said.
He said that the railways is building a sandbox system where the new technologies will be tested in an isolated environment before being introduced for the commercial use.
In a statement, the ministry said that the RailOne app offers single-sign-on facility which reduces the burden from user to remember several passwords. “Once downloaded, the user can use their existing user credentials of RailConnect or UTSonMobile app to register. Further, users need not carry several applications for different services of the railways. The facility of R-Wallet (Railway e-wallet) has also been incorporated,” it said.