Book railway ticket on phone, get 5% on R-wallet recharge

CHENNAI: Railway commuters in Chennai and Tamil Nadu who use the R-wallet to book mobile-tickets would soon get Rs 5 extra when they recharge the R-wallet for Rs 100.

The directive has come from the Railway Board (RB) on May 3 to promote unreserved ticket booking through mobile phones. The scheme will be trialled for a period of three months after which it will be reviewed, the order stated.

Sources said that this was after Southern Railway, covering Tamil Nadu and Kerala, wrote to RB with some ideas buoyed by the tremendous response to m-ticketing in the zone. From April 14, people across Tamil Nadu and Kerala can book unreserved tickets on their mobile phones through the ‘utsonmobile’ application, skipping long queues. In Chennai suburban railway network, this facility has been available since 2015.

Statistics accessed from Southern Railway show that within four weeks of of the launch of the facility, a whopping 10 lakh passengers had booked unreserved m-tickets. This is 2% of the total unreserved tickets sold. On an average, anywhere between 40,000 to 80,000 m-tickets are booked everyday, sometimes touching the magic mark of 3%.

Apart from this, around 30,000-40,000 m-tickets are being booked on a daily basis on the Chennai suburban railway network.

This means that around 1 lakh mobile-tickets are being booked across SR on a daily basis on most days, say railway officials. “Our next target is to have a five percent penetration in the mobile-ticketing market,” said a senior official.

This is part of mission five minutes of the Railway Ministry, which envisages a passenger being able to buy a ticket within five minutes of his arrival at the station.

Around 93% of Southern Railway’s passengers are in the unreserved segement and this has only gone up after the recent bus fare hike across Tamil Nadu, statistics show.

The RB directive also stated that the maximum recharge limit on R-wallet has been increased from Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000.