Ever since the NDA government stormed to power in 2014, the transformation of the Indian Railways has turned out to be one of its major achievements. A number of features and innovative measures that have been incorporated by the national carrier have ensured that the Railways have become a better, safer and more convenient mode of travel. The Indian Railways has now taken another step that will ensure that there is greater transparency in rail travel and ticket booking.
Indian Railways has taken an innovative step which will help in setting new benchmarks in transparency in berth reservation. The reservation charts for all trains will now be made public on the IRCTC website. Passengers will no longer have to run behind the TTE for vacant berths on the passenger trains. This historic step is aimed at ensuring greater transparency and eliminating corruption in the operation of passenger trains. Indian Railways has stated that this step will help the prospective passengers in getting information on any vacant berths that are available in the train after chart preparation. The information will be made available after preparation of the first chart around 4 hours before the departure of the train and the second chart will be made available around 30 minutes before the train leaves the originating station. This will be an efficient system and the second chart will incorporate changes based on current reservations and any cancellations made after the first chart. This feature will be available on both the web and mobile version of the IRCTC e-ticket booking platform. As per the Indian Railways, passengers will now be able to approach the TTE on the basis of the information of seat availability on board for ticket booking as well.
The new interface will give graphical representation of the train coaches along with berth-wise accommodation status on the irctc.co.in website. The layout of 9 classes of coaches will be displayed online which will promote ease of access for the users. This feature is going to ensure a better graphical interface for those booking rail tickets through the online medium. The most important takeaway for passengers is that TTEs will not be able to deny berths on ad-hoc basis. Additionally, passengers will have the facility to view the exact position of the berth allocated to a PNR in the graphical coach layout during PNR enquiry. Here is how passengers can check reservation charts on IRCTC website:
- On the IRCTC website, a new option of view “Charts/Vacancy” will be made available.
- The train journey details such as train number, journey date and boarding station will be required as an input from the user and after that, the class-wise and coach-wise number of vacant berths can be seen.
- The user can also click on a specific coach to see the layout along with berth-wise accommodation status such as; occupied for full journey, occupied for part journey and vacant for full journey.
- The position of berth allocated to a PNR in the coach layout can be seen in PNR Enquiry & book ticket history.
The credit for transforming the Indian Railways in the last one year or so must go the present Railways minister, Piyush Goyal. He has worked tirelessly towards improvement in rail travel and it can safely be said that his efforts are finally bringing about the desired results.
