Western Railway takes step to decrease queue for tickets

An out-of-the-box ticket sale idea, called Jaldi 5 and 10, by Western Railway has, for the first time, allowed the suburban system to dispense over five tickets in a minute.

The railway vision of ideal ticket sales states that a booking clerk should be able to sell five tickets in a minute and a commuter should get a ticket within five minutes of his walking into a station. So far, both ideas have never worked.

While getting a ticket within five minutes of walking into a station will take some more time, thanks to the inadequate number of ticket windows and Automated Ticket Vending Machines (ATVMs), the plan to have designated counters selling only Rs 5 and Rs 10 tickets at some of the busiest stations has started paying dividends.

Latest statistics show that some of these counters are selling 5-6 tickets a minute against the normal three. Against an hourly average of around 160 tickets from the conventional counters, the new ones are selling almost 250 tickets. In one instance, they even had a hit of 350 in an hour.

Speaking to the press earlier, Hemant Kumar, general manager, WR, said that the scheme has taken off in a very robust way.

"It's greatly helping in reducing passenger queues. It was done after we realised that tickets of Rs 5 and Rs 10 denominations sell the most as far as card tickets are concerned," said Kumar.

These two denominations make up 78% of all card tickets sold on WR's suburban system.

As reported by dna, the decommissioning of 115 ATVMs at one go out of the 195 ATVMs last year had made WR's suburban counters the most crowded. WR commuters, on an average, spend more time buying tickets than their Central Railway counterparts.

Station Fixed-denomination counter
Dadar: 2
Bandra: 1
Andheri: 3
Borivali: 2
Vasai Rd: 1