IIT-K students develop super fast rail ticket booking system

KANPUR: Two students of Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K) have developed an efficient system of rail ticket booking at counters that drastically reduces the booking timings.

Abhishek Bose and Jyotsana students of second year of Master of Designing Course displayed their model at the UX Now Design Challenge 2017 held at IIT-Delhi recently and bagged the first prize.

They said the system aims at digitizing the reservation requisition slips.

The slips would be available online on a mobile app and also at special kiosks in reservation offices. Travelers can fill the details online using the app or fill them at the kiosk.

On submitting the form online or at the kiosk all the entered information gets stored in the railways database and the customer receives a unique token number on mobile phone.

“So when one goes over to the counter for booking tickets, they just need to show this token number. The booking staff

THIS WOULD ALSO CHECK THE MULTIPLE BOOKING OF TICKETS BY SINGLE PERSON AND DISCOURAGE FAKE BOOKING BY TRAVEL AGENTS

would retrieve the information and proceed to check availability of train and book the ticket. This would eliminate the task of re-filling the data from requisition slip into the system and thus save time,” they said.

At present the applicants write the journey details on the requisition slip and submit it to the ticket booking staff. The staff then again enters these details into the system manually. Based on preliminary observation, the booking process takes around 4-6 minute per person. This creates a big problem during tatkal booking hours where even a fraction of a second counts a lot.

With the new system, the booking would be completed within 45 seconds, they said.

This would also check the multiple booking of tickets by single person and discourage fake booking by travel agents.