Suburban & unreserved tickets to be printed in Marathi from May 1

In order to mark Maharashtra Day on May 1, the Central Railway (CR) has decided to print unreserved and suburban tickets in Marathi. The Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) will launch the trilingual system, that already has Hindi and English, for all rail tickets. The official said now the names of originating and destination stations will be printed in Marathi.

Earlier this week, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu implemented the same. “CR has taken a leaf out of the book of the South Western Railway and Southern Railway, which printed tickets Kannada, and Malayalam and Tamil respectively in select stations this year,” said official.

In 2017, the Indian Railways’ passenger amenities committee had given its approval to a proposal to incorporate regional languages on

tickets from January 1, 2018. The Railway Board has asked zonal railways to execute this initiative. The rail officials developing this said they have already completed the trials and are now ready to print the state language on rail tickets for both suburban and long-distance. “This will be applicable on both Central and Western Railways whereby Marathi will be printed on tickets. We will also have Gujarati for stations coming under that state,” added a senior railway

official.

He added CRIS has made changes for printing of a third language in the Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS). The database needs to be updated as per the regional language in the UTS.

“As per central government policy, we have made the changes in the application to add the regional language in the ticket. UTS tickets will now display information of the journey in the regional language,” said Uday Boghate, General Manager of CRIS.