Railways takes a giant step to get closer to you -Governance Now

Railways takes a giant step to get closer to you

New level of comfort for passengers, revenues expected to jump further

Brajesh Kumar | February 5, 2010

Indian Railways is taking consumer comfort to the next level. After having tasted stupendous success on the online reservation front, it is all set to make all its services accessible through a single web portal.

Soon you will be able to book a retiring room, cloak room, pay for freight charges, book parcel and lodge a complaint online.

Currently, passengers can book a ticket online, but there is no provision for booking parcels or freight or a retiring room online.

The integrated web portal, which is being developed by technology giant Hewlett Packard, will become operational in six months, a senior official said.

At present Indian railways has indianrailways.gov.in as a single window for all information on railways. The site receives on average 300,000 hits a day – clearly among the popular websites in India. The site, however, does not support any transaction on it.

“We aim to integrate all railways services and make them accessible through one web portal,” the senior official told Governance Now. Apart from indianrailways.gov.in, railways have 32 different websites for different services, for example, all 16 zones have their own websites.

The forthcoming web portal, the name for which has not been decided yet, will bring together all these websites.

The idea to develop a integrated web portal came after the roaring success of the online ticket booking facility provided by railways subsidiary IRCTC.

IRCTC’s ticketing revenue has seen an increase of 462 percent over the past three years. Its sales have jumped from Rs.704.9 crore in 2006-07 to Rs.1,744.7 crore in 2007-08 and further to Rs.3,966.98 crore in 2008-09.

While officials did not reveal the revenue expected from the proposed website, they were certain it will see a a further jump.

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