In a move that is rather user friendly, IRCTC has announced that the wait-listed travelers will soon get ticket booking status on their mobile phones through text alerts on confirmation of their tickets, before journey. Railways will launch its SMS-based ticketing from July, this year. The organisation has described it as environment-friendly, for no hard copies are needed.
CRIS, the technological arm of Railways, is building a software which will be pre-programmed to send an SMS alert to the wait-listed passengers, about the ticket status. The contacts will be collected at the time of ticket booking. In the current system, a passenger has to dial enquiry number 139 or use the Internet to know the status of the wait-listed ticket.
Recently, Indian Railways had successfully launched a system for booking tickets using mobile phones. In the new software, registration of the mobile number with IRCTC will be done as in the booker’s bank. The bank provides MMID (Mobile Money Identifier) and OTP (One Time Password) for payment authorisation. The SMS-based ticketing service will be simplified to applying the train number, destination, journey date, class and passenger details like name, age and gender in the SMS specified box.
“Once the SMS-based service is operational, passengers will get the updated status of their wait-listed tickets automatically, only those passengers will get the message whose tickets get confirmed.” said a railways official in a PTI report.
