Mumbai: Railways tweaking ticketing app, to be available in 3 months

People will no longer need to get their vaccination certificate verified separately for local train travel as seen here at Mahim station in August, when the UTS app is modified. File pics/Ashish Raje

Mumbaikars could soon book tickets online for local train travel again, as there are plans to tweak the existing Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS), to integrate the holder's Cowin vaccination certificate. Presently, Mumbai railways issue only season tickets on verification of the vaccination certificate with universal pass at ticket counters.

The Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), Indian Railways' IT arm is working on updating the UTS, which could help lakhs of commuters, especially as the state has allowed all suburban local services to operate fully.

A senior official said, "The UTS app modification is being done on an all-India basis. CRIS is working on tweaking UTS app wherein verification of vaccination certificate will be enabled. Once this is tested and functional, online ticketing will be made available for public."

Local train services are fully operational and when the UTS is updated, it will aide lakhs of people

Thousands of Automated Ticketing Machines, self-ticketing zones, and the online ticketing application have been disabled in the pandemic, as there is no provision of authenticating the vaccine certificate.

The Maharashtra government has only enabled season pass only after vaccine certificate verification, there are no single journey or any other form of tickets. The app presently does not have the provision to verify or isolate other forms of tickets like this, hence the problem.

Another official said that the vaccine certificate currently does not have the holder's photograph and hence needs to be authenticated with other government documents. Once the UTS is integrated with Cowin, the issue will not be a problem and it will be possible to reactivate online ticketing and other machines.

Commuter speak

"Across the world, public transport has enabled online ticketing. In a city like Mumbai, the railways have disabled online ticketing. It is quite ironic and uncalled for. If online ticketing worked, half the crowd at ticket booking counters would vanish," Subhash Gupta of Rail Yatri Parishad said.

A railway spokesperson said that enabling ticketing machines and the app will indeed be beneficial, but given the unprecedented times, we want to ensure that vaccine certificates are encapsulated in the ticket app, too.

March 22
Month in 2020 that city's local trains were shut down in the pandemic

Oct 28
Day local train services will be fully restored to pre-pandemic level