Railway passengers alert! IRCTC announces new ticket booking changes

New Delhi: Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the ticketing arm of Indian Railways has made a little change in the rules for booking train tickets. Now, while booking tickets, passengers will have to provide their own mobile number as their contact details. Indian Railways has taken this step in view of the increasing number of ticket touts and fake tickets surrounding the railways.

The move is also aimed at cutting down the touts from whom a fews railway passengers buy their train. The IRCTCnew rule on providing passenger's own contact number will be a deterent for touts.

Indian Railways has noticed that because the tickets don't have the passengers numbers (the ones being bought from touts or IRCTC account of others) their number does not get registered in the Passenger Reservation System (PRS) system due to which passengers often do not receive SMS notifications on their mobile phones. The information regarding cancellation of train or revision in a train’s schedule is also missed by the passengers in the notification.

In other news, Rail passengers can now easily see real-time PNR status as well as other information related to travel through WhatsApp. For this, the passengers will have to save a number in their mobile. Here is the complete process.

1. Save the phone number 9881193322 in your smartphone

2. Go to WhatsApp and open the chat box number 9881193322

3. Now you will have to message the PNR number in the chat box

4. You Will have to reply to the information asked for verification

5. Once you complete the above process, you will get updates related to your journey continuously on WhatsApp

In November this year, the IRCTC has announced a new rule for booking tickets. According to this new rule, a second reservation chart will be prepared 30 minutes before the scheduled departure of trains.

Earlier, during the pandemic period, the chart was being prepared two hours ahead of the train departure for the convenience of the passengers. Before pandemic times, only first chart used to be prepared, four hours in advance of the departure. The remaining seats could be booked by passengers online or by visiting passenger reservation system (PRS) counters. People were give seats on first-come-first-serve basis.