News Brief
Arun Kumar Das
Sep 25, 2021, 11:09 AM | Updated 11:09 AM IST
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As a Digital India initiative by the government and with a view to promote cashless transactions, contact less ticketing and customer convenience and experience, UTS on Mobile app is now available in Hindi language apart from English.
In order to further ease booking experience of unreserved tickets, users can opt for any one language of his/her choice. Using UTS on Mobile app, users can choose between paperless or paper ticket mode and can book any type of tickets including journey ticket, season ticket and platform ticket.
There will be no waiting in the ticket queue as it would be paperless and environmentally friendly. According to the Railways, once a ticket is booked, the ticket can be shown to the TTE even in offline mode without any internet connection.
Passengers who are in a hurry or make a last minute decision to travel can just reach the station, scan the QR code displayed at various places at the station and book the ticket. This facility is presently available at 1,600 stations.
The customer can use all types of digital payment options including debit card, credit card, Net Banking, UPI and E-Wallets. The customers who use Rail-Wallet Facility are given a 5 per cent bonus on recharge.
For example, if a passenger recharges his wallet for Rs 1,000, he gets a recharge value of Rs 1,050.
The Mobile Ticket application is fully developed in-house by CRIS, the software arm of the Railways, and is available across platforms — Android and iOS — and can be downloaded free of cost from the respective stores.
The application has been widely appreciated for its usability and customer experience and has got a four star rating on Google Play Store. Number of registered users of UTS Mobile application are 1.47 crore.
Conventionally, unreserved tickets were sold at the booking counters of railway stations. With a view to reduce waiting time of passengers at booking counters, railway ticketing agents and automated ticket vending machines were introduced as additional points of sale at bigger stations.
However, physical presence of customers was required at all these three points of sale.
UTS mobile ticketing was launched on December 27, 2014 after the system was rigorously tested on the parameters of safety, security and customer experience and later on, proliferated over the entire Mumbai Suburban.
Gradually, Mobile Ticketing was extended to the metro cities of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Secunderabad between years 2015-17. From November 1, 2018 onwards, UTS Mobile Ticketing is available for inter zonal travel between any pair of stations over the entire Indian Railway network on the pattern of normal ticketing.
Arun Kumar Das is a senior journalist covering railways. He can be contacted at akdas2005@gmail.com.