NEW DELHI: To attract more passengers to buy online train tickets, Railways has introduced a service ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ which allow passengers to make payment for tickets booked online within a window of 15 days.
The facility is available for confirmed, waitlisted and RAC births. It allows passenger to travel after 5 days of booking ticket, which means they can pay ticket fare 10 days after travelling.
The IRCTC, a railway PSU, has tied up with a company specialising in payment later options. The service has been started two days back and is available to passengers booking e-tickets through IRCTC website.
The idea was to provide more facilities to passengers opting for online transactions, keeping in mind the Centre’s push for Digital India. Presently, nearly 58 percent of total train tickets are booked online.
While booking tickets through IRCTC website, ticket buyer will get an option to make payment 15 days later on the website and those opting for it will have to pay 3.5 percent plus taxes extra for the service.
The ticket buyers will be asked to provide their Aadhaar and PAN card details and an OTP will be generated for final booking. Customer’s eligibility for the feature will be checked automatically by the company based on their previous transactions records.
IRCTC is expecting that this will attract more travelers to opt for online ticketing. Post demonestisation in November 2016, there has been focus on encouraging people to opt of digital mode of transaction and many incentives are being provided by the government.
Service charge on tickets booked online has been waived off since November 2016, which is likely incur an annual loss of Rs 500 crore on railways.