Improving Experience at Indian Railways Reservation Counters by Digitizing the Ticketing Process

In the current Indian Railways counter ticket reservation scenario, the applicant has to write all the journey details on the reservation requisition form and then has to hand it over to the ticket booking staff at the counter. The staff then has to re-enter those details into the computer system manually. It takes more time for the staff to type the information when the form has multiple passengers for the same journey. Though the counters work on first-come-first-serve basis but the service time at the counter window varies drastically between 4 and 6 min per applicant. This creates a much bigger problem for the applicants during Tatkal booking hours where even a fraction of second makes or breaks a journey for many passengers. With an extensive user survey of applicants and staffs at various reservation counters across the country, we identified the core reasons for non-uniformity in ticket booking timings. It was found that the major factor for this non-uniformity of ticketing time is due to variable human proficiency factors such as number of passenger names in the requisition form, handwriting of the applicant in the requisition form, and typing speed of the staff at the counter. This paper proposes a new digital system comprising of a mobile-based application and kiosks (for non-smartphone owners) that will generate a unique code for booking counter tickets. This code will help to eliminate the manual data entry of the journey details into the reservation system by the staff and make the booking process more efficient and faster by reducing the cognitive load on the staff. With this system, the service time to book the ticket at the reservation counter window will be 40–45 s regardless of the number of passengers in the list.