Railways new Ticketing Rules comes into effect; UTS Ticket valid for 3 Hours only

Unreserved tickets for distances upto 199 km, the journey has to be started from the originating station within three hours of the issue of tickets or upto the departure of first train for the destination whichever is later.

The return journey facility for distance upto 199 km for unreserved tickets has been withdrawn.

Railways on Tuesday launched bar coding system for unreserved tickets to prevent revenue leakage and bring transparency in the ticketing system.

Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu said bar coding of unreserved tickets will be launched in three stations of the city — New Delhi, Old Delhi and Nizamuddin.

The bar coding project has been introduced as a pilot project at nine ticket counters in these stations.

“The circulation of unauthorised tickets was affecting railways’ revenue. The bar coding system will prevent such malpractices,” Mohd. Jamshed, Railway Board Member (Traffic), said.

He said Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) has decided to print encrypted QR code on unreserved tickets through thermal printers.

The bar coding feature includes details like ticket number, stock number, fare, source station, destination station, number of adults, number of children, train type, class code and date of journey, that are printed in the form of encrypted QR code.

Mr. Jamshed explained that whenever a staff checks the ticket, he can scan the encrypted QR code and validate the information printed on the ticket to prevent any fraud.

In this technology, printing will be done through thermal printer on thermal stationery only. Therefore, fraud by taking out carbon copy of the ticket or erasing of data and printing of other information on it will be detected by scanning its QR, he noted.