Sai devotees soon will have the option of not standing in a queue for several hours to reach the shrine.
Sai devotees soon will have the option of not standing in a queue for several hours to reach the shrine.
In the next three months, the Shri Sai Sansthan, Shirdi trust has decided to introduce an online booking system for devotees to pay their respect and for hostel accommodation. Those who register online will not have to stand in queue for more than an hour. They will be told the approximate time when they can pay their respect and will be able to finish their visit within an hour of the time mentioned. Those who do not book will have to stand in the regular queue.
“To reduce workload and improve crowd management, we are introducing the latest technology for online booking. It will help reduce crowds in Shirdi and also save devotees’ time. Apart from creating more transparency in Sansthan’s work, the project will also help us monitor devotee numbers, the free meals distributed and donations,” said Jayant Sasane, Sansthan chairman.
He added that the facility may start in February 2011. “It is a large project and we had floated a tender for the work. We have given the project to a leading software company and will be spending between Rs20 crore and Rs25 crore on the project,” he said.
The project is being supervised by KV Ramani, a Chennai-based entrepreneur and former chief of NASSCOM who donated Rs 60 crore to the shrine to build a hostel complex to accommodate 16,000 devotees.
The booking and registration system is part of a larger software project called Saitech that will connect all temple departments.
The project is being implemented by Cognizant, an IT firm. “The company will look at the work for five years and train Sansthan staff to operate the system. We are creating a system for tracking the progress of administrative work at the trust. We are also creating an online information centre,” said Rahul Galande, a senior official of the trust’s IT department.
The trust will set up one outlet each in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai where pilgrims, who do not have credit card, can book accommodation at the pilgrim hostels. When the system is in place, the shrine will be second to Tirumala Tirupati to have an online booking facility.
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