Twenty million passengers travel daily on Indian Railways using the unreserved journey facility. An unreserved ticket authorizes these journeys but as the name implies, offers no reserved seats or berths. The ticket is not specific to a train service either. This facility is predominantly used by commuters and suburban travelers – over short distances where assured seating is not a necessity. It is also available to lower income groups travelling longer distances and connects the rural hinterland to districts, towns and cities. Tickets are issued to the unreserved passenger any time of day or night as booking offices remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) caters to this segment of the market and seeks to provide a centrally administered computerized ticketing system over the entire Indian Railways. Today more than ninety percent of the unreserved tickets are sold through this system. The ability of the system to deliver ticketing at remote corners of the country and provide uninterrupted services everywhere has been lauded by the Government of India and the project along with the CRIS team responsible for its initial design and implementation won the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration. Details regarding the project are provided here and if you have any questions or want to contact us email us at uts@cris.org.in.

Unreserved Ticketing at Railway Counters

The unreserved ticketing system began as a pilot project in August 2002 on Northern Railway. A precursor to this centralized ticketing system was the Self Printing Ticket Machines (SPTMs), a standalone system that was phased out with the arrival of UTS. Initially the central hardware architecture was supported with station level servers to ensure business continuity in the event of network failures. The booking office operator dispensed the tickets using dumb terminals and dot matrix printers. Over the years, with improved reliability of the network a newer design came into force with the introduction of smart clients provided to the operator. For details regarding these, please check out our Technology section.

The graph below shows the growth of the service from 2002. Today the service is available at nearly 5000 locations over all the 16 Zones of the Indian Railways. The Zonal Railways are responsible for manning the UTS counters and running the services, while CRIS maintains the application and ensures continuity of business at the system level. There are nearly 100 ticket types that are sold through the system – based on class of travel, concessions for senior citizens and children, concessions to other categories, and season tickets. The business rules and fares are determined by the policies of the Ministry of Railways.

Jan Sadharan Ticket Booking Sewa (JTBS)

Ticketing services for the unreserved sector were also outsourced as per Railway Board’s Jan Sadharan Ticket Booking Sewa (JTBS) scheme launched in January 2007. Currently JTBS outlets are available at more than 300 locations. These outlets provide self employment opportunities and the operators are offered a commission per passenger. The terminals at these counters connect to the central servers for issuing the tickets.

Automatic Ticket Vending Machines

Apart from manned counters for dispensing tickets, there also automatic ticket vending machines (ATVM) that are operated using smart cards and touch screens. This technology was first introduced in Mumbai in Oct’2007 and the success led to proliferation to other metropolitan cities. Chennai, Secunderabad and Delhi are the other cities where these machines are currently commissioned. The next major city where this service is being offered is Kolkata. The table below shows the number of machines at each of these regions and the average daily sales as in June 2011.

Zone	Number of ATVM	Daily Avg Earning
Northern Railway	57	29025
Central Railway	166	1129371
Western Railway	115	334573
South Central Railway	64	55765
Southern Railway	61	82630

Mobile-Van Ticketing : ‘Mushkil Aasan’

In order to make ticketing a more convenient experience the concept of Mobile Counters deployed in Vans were made operational in Jan 2010. As a pilot, one such Van is functional in Delhi and Kolkata issuing both Un-reserved and Reserved Ticket. This model makes use of GPRS/CDMA technologies for connecting to the server.

The application has been developed with a 3 layered architecture in C++. The database requirements are met through a Sybase product, ASE-CE. A Java version of the application is used in the ATVMs to provide additional features in the user interface.

Currently the hardware is deployed across 08 data centres. To cater to the expansion of the user base for this application, the existing setup is being migrated to a high-end Virtualized setup. This is the first time that Virtualization has been implemented for an IR application. The backend setup has a provision to support Business Continuity ensuring a nearly 100% uptime for the application. Besides this at the client end the so called ‘Smart Clients’ have been deployed which are basically thin clients with a footprint of RDBMS and application image. These ensure continuous business operations in the event of network / backend outage. The application rides on the Unified Ticketing Network (UTN) for Passenger Reservation System and Unreserved Ticketing System.

The printing device is a customized Dot Matrix Printer. However in case of ATVMs, Thermal Printers are being used. CRIS works as the coordinating agency for procurement of peripheral equipment for the Zonal Railways. Specifications of the equipment used at stations are available here. For details on current procurements please go to our section on Tender Notices.

1. Dot Matrix Ticket Printers (view/download) 2. Dot Matrix Report Printers (view/download) 3. Dumb Terminals (view/download) 4. Thin Clients (view/download) The picture here shows a typical ATVM kiosk. The kiosks have a touch screen based user interface, a smart card reader, a thin client and a thermal printer.

The Unreserved Ticketing Services group is part of the commercial applications division within CRIS working under the guidance of Sanjaya Das, Group General Manager (Passenger Services). Sanjaya Das has been associated with the design and implementation of the complex Control Office Application and has returned to CRIS after completing a challenging assignment as Divisional Railway Manager, Ajmer. The group is currently led by Archana Joshi, General Manager, an Indian Railway Traffic Service officer with more than 25 years experience. She is assisted by P. K. Varshney, Chief Manager who is a domain knowledge expert. The technical team is led by Namit Verma, Additional General Manager. The rest of the team includes software engineers and managers spread across the CRIS regional offices at New Delhi, Gorakhpur, Patna, Kolkata, Secunderabad, Chennai and Mumbai.