Unreserved train tickets issued from railway stations in Kerala and Tamil Nadu to any of the 9,500 stations in the railway network of the country will soon have the names of the originating station and destination in Malayalam and Tamil.
From Tuesday, unreserved tickets issued from Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, Palakkad, and Kozhikode in the State and Chennai Central and Egmore in Tamil Nadu had information printed in local language.
Besides English, Hindi
Malayalam is printed in Kerala and Tamil in Tamil Nadu in addition to English and Hindi which are used at present. This passenger-friendly initiative by Southern Railway follows the recent introduction of Kannada in unreserved train tickets by Southwestern Railway.
“We are issuing unreserved tickets in local language through one counter in six selected stations. The trial run will go on for two to three days so as to find out any glitches. It will be extended to other counters of these stations and remaining stations in a phased manner,” Chief Commercial Manager (Passenger Marketing), Southern Railway, J. Vinayan told The Hindu .
A three-tier process was adopted by Railways to get the names of the 9,500 stations in the two local languages, Mr. Vinayan said. The script of these stations was rechecked by railway personnel to avoid any confusion and mistake before being fed into the computer.
In Chennai, unreserved tickets for suburban services also have station names printed in Tamil. The software provided by Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), the information technology application wing of Railways, has been upgraded to print the local language.
Nod given
Last year, Indian Railways’ passenger amenities committee had given its nod to the proposal to print train tickets in local languages from January 1, 2018. The Railway Board has tasked the zonal railways to execute the initiative. Many States such as Tamil Nadu have been demanding inclusion of local languages in tickets and official forms.
