Quick commuting with Western Railways 'Jaldi 5 and 10'

An out-of-the-box idea for selling tickets is making waves! And Western Railways suburban system, which implemented the 'Jaldi 5 and 10' scheme, is now dispensing over five tickets a minute.

According to railway's vision, a booking clerk should ideally be selling five tickets a minute, and a commuter should get a ticket within five minutes of walking into a railway station. But unfortunately, this seldom happens.

What has started paying dividends however is the idea to sell only Rs 5 and Rs 10 tickets at some of WR's busiest stations.

As per data, some of these counters are now selling five to six tickets a minute against the normal average of three. And against an hourly average of around 160 tickets at normal counters, the designated counters are now selling almost 250 tickets: at one instance it even hit a high of 350 tickets an hour.

Earlier, speaking to the media, Hemant Kumar, the WR general manager, had said the scheme had taken off in a very robust way. "It's greatly helping in reducing the length of queues. It was done after we realised that Rs 5 and Rs 10 tickets were the ones most in demand," said Kumar.

According WR data, these two make up 78% of all the card tickets sold on its suburban system.

As reported earlier, the decommissioning 115 of the total 195 Automated TicketVending Machines (ATVMs) at one go in the middle of last year had made WR's suburban counters among the most crowded with commuters here spending, on an average, more time to buy tickets than their Central Railway counterparts.

'Jaldi 5 and 10' counters
Dadar: 2
Bandra: 1
Andheri: 3
Borivli: 2
Vasai Rd 1