Southern Railway begins issue of unreserved tickets in Tamil

CHENNAI: After nearly 13 years of introduction of Unreserved Ticketing System, Tamil has started appearing in unreserved railway tickets sold in Tamil Nadu. On Saturday, Southern Railway (SR) began selling unreserved tickets printed in three languages,  including Tamil, at Chennai Egmore station.
After introduction of Unreserved Ticketing System in 2005, railways issued the tickets printed in English and Hindi, forcing lakhs of people who understood only the local language to depend on others to read the ticket details, particularly destination.

Following repeated demands by rail passengers, railways decided to introduce vernacular languages in tickets. To this effect, six months ago Southern Railway constituted a team of officials to study the language compatibility of the ticketing system and translation.On completion of trial at a few stations, railways has started introducing the tickets printed in three languages - Tamil, English and Hindi in phased a manner. A week ago, unreserved tickets in trilingual were launched at Nagercoil and Kanniyakumari stations and then the same has been extended to other stations.

“In Chennai division, we have started to issue tickets printed in Tamil along with Hindi and English. Depending upon the software updation, the same will extend to Central and other major stations,” said a senior railway official who added the issue of the tickets will continue if no technical glitches arise.
Rail passengers have welcomed the use of regional language in railway tickets.

Sankaran, who purchased an unreserved ticket to Tirunelveli, said it will make the elderly passengers from rural pockets not to depend on Travelling Ticket Examiner (TTE) or other passengers to cross verify their ticket details.“Many times, passengers face difficulties in understanding whether they purchased a superfast or express train ticket and such issues will now be resolved,” Sankaran  said.

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