Indian Railways has recently released a new rule that would end the trouble of passengers in the waiting list. From the new year, even if a railway ticket is cancelled after the train has departed from its source station, the information will be sent directly to the Travelling Ticket Examiner (TTE). Using the hand-held terminal devices, vacant seats will be allotted to the wait-listed passengers on the subsequent stations.
The devices will be directly connected to the railway server and every update on the tickets will be immediately sent to the terminal. Also, the refund on cancellation of tickets will start immediately.
Indian Railways has used this initiative as a trial in some Shatabdi Express and Rajdhani Express trains. The project will now be implemented on other trains too.
Hitherto TTE used to wait for the passenger for the next two stations to see if they turn up. Despite vacant seats, waitlisted passengers were unable to get seats.
The project will be done in two phases as it will be difficult for the Railways to provide a large number of hand-held terminal devices to all the TTEs at once. In the first phase, about 500 hand-held terminal devices will be provided to TTEs while nearly 8000 devices will be given in the second phase.