IRCTC Announces Changes In Ticket Booking Rules

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), the ticketing body of Indian Railways has announced some changes in the rules for booking a train ticket.

Passengers will have to provide their own mobile number as their contact details while booking tickets through the website or mobile app.

IRCTC has taken this decision in view of the increasing number of ticket touts and fake tickets surrounding the railways.

This new rule is also aimed at cutting down the touts from which a few railway passengers buy their train. The IRCTC’s new rule on providing passenger’s own contact numbers will be a deterrent for touts.

Indian Railways and IRCTC has noticed that because the tickets don’t have the passengers numbers (the ones being bought from agents/travel agents 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.

Also, most of the time the information regarding cancellation of train or revision in a train’s schedule is missed by the passengers in the notification.

In the other news, Indian Railways passengers can now check the PNR Status, Train Status, and train-related information directly on WhatsApp by using a new feature that has been launched by Railofy.

Here is how you can check live PNR Status and Real-time Train Status information via WhatsApp:

1.  First, you need to update your WhatsApp by heading over to the Play Store for Android or App Store for your iOS device by tapping the update button on the app description page.
   
2. Now save Railofy’s train inquiry number “+91-9881193322” on your phone. This will then bring up the contact in your WhatsApp contacts list.
   
3. Now open WhatsApp and tap on the new message button to open your contacts list.
   
4. You can choose the Railofy contact and then type in your 10 digit PNR number in the message window.
   
5. Once you send the PNR number to Railofy, it will keep you updated in real-time about the train status via WhatsApp.

Also Read: Timings of Rajdhani, Shatabdi And Few More Trains Changed From December 1: New Schedule Here