In an initiative of making things more transparent, Indian Railways has taken another passenger friendly step and made the reservation charts for all trains public on its website http://www.irctc.co.in. Now passengers, do not have to run after the TTE enquiring about a vacant berth any more.
Just like booking an airline ticket, the Indian Railways website will display the seating layout with different colours to show the seats that are booked, vacant and partially booked.
The step taken by the national transporter is aimed at ensuring greater transparency and eradicating ground corruption particularly. Piyush Goyal-led Indian Railways says that the new step will help passengers in getting latest information about any vacant berths that are available in the train after the chart is being ready.
The reservation chart will be made public after preparation of the first chart, i.e. around 4 hours before the departure of the train and the second chart will be available around 30 minutes before the train leaves its originating station.
The second chart will adapt changes based on current reservations and any cancellations made after the first chart.
Depending on the availability of seats, passengers will be able to request the TTE for ticket booking on board as well. The new interface offers graphical representation of the train coaches along with berth-wise accommodation status on the irctc.co.in website. The layout will display 9 classes of coaches. This new feature of IRCTC can be accessible both on web and mobile app version.
Since everything is quite transparent here in this approach, the most important development goes in favor of the passengers is that, they cannot be denied of berths on ad-hoc basis. On the other hand they will have the facility to view the exact position of the berth allocated to a PNR in the graphical coach layout during PNR enquiry.
According to Girish Pillai, the Member, Traffic, Railway Board, the facility is going to be availed in the next 20 days, for Shatabdi and Rajdhani passengers at the originating stations even after the train has departed the station.
