SCR to issue unreserved tickets in advance

The South Central Railway will now issue unreserved train tickets from or to any station, three days in advance.

Announcing the unreserved ticketing system (UTS) to the media here today, K K Bajpeyee, managing director, RailTel Corporation of India Limited (RailTel), said under phase-I of UTS, 23 stations in the Secunderabad, Vijayawada and Guntakal divisions were connected to the RailTel's existing optical fibre communication (OFC) network and 59 more stations would be added to the network shortly.

Of the total 95 stations planned to be connected in the SCR division, 82 stations fall on the RailTel's network while the rest would be connected through BSNL network.

Citing non-availability of tickets as one of the reasons for ticketless travel, Bajpeyee said the idea of setting up UTS was conceived three years back by the ministry of railways. The UTS is expected to reduce the rush-hour traffic and allow the passengers to buy tickets at their convenience three days in advance.

RailTel is also in the process of opening cyber cafes and ATMs at railway stations. The corporation is targeting to set up cyber cafes on the franchisee business model at 50 of the 82 stations on the network.

In Andhra Pradesh, they would be setting up at Secunderabad, Hyderabad, Guntur, Vijayawada, Vizag and Tirupathi, said A Seshagiri Rao, general manager (southern region), RailTel.

On providing ATMs at the stations, Bajpeyee said that discussions were on at the board level but the delay could be attributed to procedural issues rather than technological issues.

Speaking about the future plans of RailTel, Bajpeyee said that works on 7004-km were at various stages of completion and that they planned to achieve a target of extending the OFC backbone network to cover 42,000 km across the country by 2008.

Indian railways' network currently extends to about 62,800 km across the country. RailTel owns 27,888 km of OFC laid along the seamless right of way along the railway track and so far has commissioned 23,800 km.

RailTel, a wholly owned subsidiary of railways was formed in September 2000 to create nation-wide broadband telecom and multi-media network. The corporation's total revenues during 2004-05 amounted to Rs 65.35 crore, 250 per cent more than Rs 25.95 crore that achieved during 2003-04, and expects to grow at 30-40 per cent in the coming three to four years.

RailTel has created assets worth Rs 850 crore consisting of country-wide OFC network powered by high speed 2.5 giga bytes per second, synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) system and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) IP network.