28 June,2019 07:10 AM IST | | Rajendra B. Aklekar
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The city's railway commuters are going digital like never before. The data of downloads and ticket booking on the Mumbai suburban railway (Western Railway) has shown a spike of nearly 250 per cent in online ticket reservations through the railways' official app called UTS On Mobile (UTS is Unreserved Ticketing System).
"The ticketing app is the future and more convenient than the physical ticket. Season tickets are available, as also are single and return tickets and one can 'fill' the wallet for emergency bookings. The problem of not being able to buy tickets through the app near stations has been solved by QR codes. It is an evolving app and is getting good response from commuters," a senior railway official said.
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"A robust growth of more than 250% has been recorded in the year 2019-20 (upto May) as compared to the previous corresponding period. The average passengers per day have massively increased from 55,000 in the year 2018-19 to approximately 2 lakh passengers in 2019-20 on the suburban line," Western Railway's Chief Public Relations Officer Ravinder Bhakar said.
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Bhakar said more than 3.64 crore passengers have used the UTS app on Western Railway since November 2018, out of which approximately 3.48 crore have booked tickets through it on the Mumbai Suburban line. "The growth of UTS app has been a success story of the Indian Railways. We intend to proliferate it by incorporating as many suggestions of commuters as possible," Central Railway's Chief Public Relations Officer Sunil Udasi said. He said in June 2019 itself, about 53,000 tickets were sold on average every day with 3.78 lakh passengers using the app, bringing in revenue of Rs 33.14 lakh.
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