Mumbai: To encourage passengers to use mobile ticketing and Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVMs), Western Railway has decided to add incentives to these transactions. Passengers can now use their smart card receipts to make purchases at railway catering stalls.
A railway official explained that a passenger adding a ₹50 recharge could use the receipt to buy an item costing ₹52, and a ₹100 recharge would let her buy an something for ₹105. The incentives are in addition to the existing 5% discount ATVM users already get. This promotion started on May 31 and will run until November 30. The incentives are available at 111 catering railway-owned catering stalls as well as other associated stalls.
Mukul Jain, divisional railway manager, WR, said, “We have tied up with the catering stalls to promote the ATVM and mobile ticketing so as to to decrease the queues at booking counters.”
WR carries approximately 37 lakh passengers a day, earning ₹74,83,069 from them. But it has only 6,89,515 active smart card users (a passenger needs a smart catd to use the ATVMs) who buy an average of 1,29,179 tickets a day, and sells 766 smart cards a day. WR’s app also has very low usage, with 1,521 registered passengers buying approximately 1109 tickets a day through mobile ticketing.
The majority of single journey ticket buyers — around 5,87,279 — seem to prefer to stand in long queues to buy their tickets at traditional ticket counters. With the incentives, WR hopes to get more passengers to adopt these cashless options.
