Courtesy: iGovernment Bureau

At present 156 PRS centres are being operated under the NFR at different locations, including far-flung interior places of the region

All district headquarters across Northeast including Sikkim will soon have an IT-enabled Passenger Reservation System (PRS) for railway reservations. The Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) is gearing up to provide PRS system in the remote parts of the region.

The PRS developed by the Centre for Railway Information System, New Delhi is part of the Country-wide Network for Computerised Enhanced Reservation and Ticketing (CONCERT) and is helping in issuing reserved tickets.

This system connects all ticket issuing centres across the country through computer aided country-wide network. Each of these centres facilitates buying tickets for travel between any two stations on any trains running in the country.

“With the application of PRS a person can buy journey tickets even from a PRS centre miles away from his or her originating station. The system is also linked to Internet to enable passengers to buy tickets online through the Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website,” an NFR official statement said.

The statement said at present 156 PRS centres were being operated under the NFR at different locations, including far-flung interior places of the region and mountain locations like Thegu in Sikkim and another 20 more PRS will be commissioned in the current financial year.

Some PRS centres are being operated in collaboration with state governments, some others are operated by India Post. Many PRS centres have been commissioned at non-rail head locations just to provide reservation facilities to the people of this region.

The NFR is also commissioning more Unreserved Ticketing System which facilitates issuing tickets faster, fare calculations and accounts using computers. So far 24 UTS have been commissioned and NFR is planning 30 more facilities within the current financial year, the statement added.

Through UTS passengers can buy tickets at any convenient time suited to them three days before the departure of a train if the travel distance is more than 200-kilometers.

However, this facility is available for unreserved tickets only. This system will further be enhanced to make it possible to dispense tickets from hand held ticketing device provided to the TTEs in the trains, self-operated touch screen kiosks and Smart Card based Automatic Vending Machine.

 

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