Coming soon: Mumbai train commuters can book a season pass on their smart phone

The idea of getting a suburban train ticket without standing in queue at the ticket counter or the automatic ticket vending machines ATVMs became a reality in July when the Railways started paperless ticketing on mobile phones But it does not appear to have enthused Mumbaikars and so the Railways are making yet another attempt to interest them by introducing the option of buying season passes through mobile ticketingRailway Minister Suresh Prabhu inaugurates the mobile ticketing system at Dadar in 2014 It did not pick up so the Railways are introducing season pass on mobile ticketing to interest commutersThe Centre for Railway Information System CRIS mdash the software coding agency of the Indian Railways mdash has prepared the mobile ticketing system and is likely to start it from October 7 ldquoWe are ready with introducing the season passes and platform ticket options in the mobile ticket apprdquo confirmed Uday Bobhate General Manager CRISAccording to officials season passes are bought by nearly 65 percent of the total commuter base of 75 lakh people travelling on the suburban system The option of skipping the queue while buying monthly quarterly halfyearly and yearly passes will now be available on smart phones which might lure more people into using themAs per process the option will be provided on the first page after opening the UTS app A commuter can book a season pass at least 10 days before the existing pass expires ldquoAn option of selecting a date after the validity of the earlier season pass will also be providedrdquo said a railway officialThe money will be deducted from the Rwallet that will be created by the user A separate file will be created within the UTS app where this season pass will be stored If a ticket collector asks the commuter to present his ticket he or she will only have to flash this ticket on their phone The officials said that no changes could be made after booking so as to keep it tamper freeThe paperless mobile ticket option on UTSonMobile app was inaugurated in July by Union Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu It works on Android and Windows phones and was initially launched for Western Railway commuters This gave commuters the option of not taking printouts With the season pass option coming in mobile ticketing mdash for daily and season pass mdash will also be extended to Central Railway as well thus helping all 75lakh daily commutersMobile ticketing a flopPresently mobile ticketing has not been a hit with Mumbaikars Recently GC Agarwal General Manager of Western Railway had said ldquoMobile ticketing has not picked up as expected and barely 1000odd tickets are sold every dayrdquoThe figures too show that from July to September the WR authorities have sold 30965 paperless tickets which have fetched them a mere R488 lakh Mobile ticketing was first introduced in late December 2014 wherein people were allowed to book tickets from their cell phones but then they had to take printouts from ATVM machines From December onwards the railways have sold 91302 tickets mdash from mobile ticketing where printouts of these tickets were taken from ATVMs mdash that fetched them Rs 1458 lakhSources said that some of the possible reasons for mobile ticketingrsquos poor performance could be the transactional surcharge of Rs 10 This is charged to all commuters who want to recharge their ewallet apart from the service charge The Railways have already written letters to the Ministry of Finance asking them to waive off this surcharge as they are running a public transportHow to use it1 Download and install UTS app on your smart phone2 Firsttime users need to sign up3 Select the city as Mumbai4 Use normalquick booking as per choice given in the app window5 Purchase tickets using Rwallet6 Rwallet can be recharged on wwwutson mobileindianrailgovin or at any suburban ticket window recharge can be minimum R100 and maximum R50007 Same ewallet can be used to book the season pass and platform ticketHow mobile ticketing worksgtgt The Indian Space Research Organisation ISRO has mapped the entire route from Churchgate to Dahanu by satellitegtgt One can book a ticket on onersquos mobile phone if one is 30 metres away from the outer tracks up to a maximum of 2 kilometresgtgt A ticket booked using the app has a distinct colour code for each day and an embedded Quick Response QR code that cannot be forwarded to another mobile nor edited