Rly to get e-ticketing
The railway ministry is going to introduce e-ticketing to check black marketing of railway tickets and make tickets more available to the passengers, reducing their plights.
A company will be appointed soon to introduce the new system, Railway Minister Suranjit Sengupta told reporters at Railway Bhaban in the city yesterday.
He said advance tickets will be sold three days ahead of travel instead of the current 10 days while one will be allowed to buy up to four tickets at a time, not 10.
The decisions will come in to effect from February 20.
There are widespread allegations that a good number of advance tickets go in to the hands of brokers, who then sell the tickets at higher prices to the passengers. A section of railway officers are engaged in this malpractice.
Suranjit also hinted that producing national identity cards might be made mandatory for buying advance tickets in future in a bid to stop black marketing.
“These are parts of our effort to improve the overall service of the railway sector,” he said.
He said railway is incurring a loss of about Tk 750 crore every year, which has to be reduced.
Asked whether train fares will be increased to reduce this loss, he said passenger and freight train fares were not increased in the last 20 years although prices of everything, especially that of fuel, increased by several hundred percent during the period. “We may hike the fares in future, but before that we must improve our services to the passengers,” he added.
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