Ministry of Railways launches all-India unreserved mobile ticketing facility

The Ministry of Railways (MoR) has launched an all-India unreserved mobile ticketing facility. This facility allows the booking of unreserved tickets including season tickets and platform tickets. The booking of unreserved tickets for all non-suburban sections of all zonal railways has been provided for. It is available via a mobile application – UTSONMOBILE – on Android, iOS as well as Windows mobile devices. The mobile application accepts payments from all types of digital modes via payment aggregators along with the railway wallet – R-wallet. The facility has been made effective from November 1, 2018. A pilot project for the facility was initiated in December 2014 wherein booking of unreserved tickets was allowed through mobiles. Later, during 2015, 2016 and 2017 unreserved mobile ticketing was applied to all suburban sections of Chennai, Delhi, Kolkata and Secunderabad along with the facility of paperless ticketing. In 2015, UTSONMOBILE was introduced on non-suburban sections on the Delhi-Palwal section of Northern Railway which was further extended to other non-suburban sections of the Northern, South Central, Southern, South Western, East Coast, South East Central and South Eastern railways. The average number of passengers daily booking tickets using this application has increased from approximately 5,400 in 2015 to 470,000 in October 2018. The mobile app will allow the seamless booking of railway tickets and will eliminate the need for passengers to wait in queues for buying tickets.