Rail reforms canceled ticket refunds; approximately 50% of claims settled within 6 hours

Around 50 per cent of refunds for canceled e-tickets are now processed within six hours of cancellation, thanks to a quiet reform that has taken place over the past few months in the Indian Railways. INDIA TODAY was the first to report the move in March.

Refunding money after canceling tickets online was a constant pain for train travelers. Railway data now shows that money is refunded within the day in case of e-tickets and filing of Ticket Deposit Receipts (TDRs) online in almost 98 percent of cases, providing some relief to passengers at this time. peak summer travel season.

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There are on average 5,000 refund cases every day. Over the past few months, the Ministry of Railways has been pushing to change the archaic and time-consuming methods of processing refunds by systematically targeting all bottlenecks in the loop. Previously, each refund request was reviewed by the Traveling Ticket Examiner (TTE) of the train concerned to verify that the person requesting the refund had in fact not undertaken the journey. The inquiries were sent to the concerned zonal railways where the TTE maps were verified. The process took days, if not longer.

Now TTEs carry handheld terminals, which are linked to the information system in the backend, and this data is synchronized in no time. The ministry has been pushing areas to purchase these terminals and use them everywhere and abandon the old method of TTEs carrying their paper cards. It has been decreed that no refunds should be made in areas where mobile device data is available. Thus, in almost all cases of reimbursement requests that are verified using mobile terminal data, the money is now credited within the day, officials said.

Secondly, the ministry has also initiated systemic changes within the IT infrastructure of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) as well as the Center for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), which forms the backbone of the railway information system. Ticketing. Refund processes, for example, are now triggered immediately and automatically, speeding up the crediting of money to the customer’s source account.

During the current summer season, the railways transport 2.1 million passengers in reserved classes every day. This represents around 200,000 more passengers per day than in May last year. With increasing demand for tickets and more travelers, the number of cancellations is also seeing an increase.

If a waitlisted e-ticket is not confirmed or a train trip is canceled, the money is automatically refunded. But in several other cases, the passenger has to request a refund of the e-ticket money by filing the TDR online on the IRCTC website.

Reimbursing canceled tickets is a major problem for travelers due to the time it takes for the money to actually be credited. The railways are almost constantly criticized on social media, with users complaining that their refund amount was not credited days after the cancellation.

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