New Delhi February 27 2013: Indian Railways are slowly embracing technologies like mobile e-ticketing and ubiquitous Internet. In his budget speech inParliament on February 26, Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal promised to introduce Wi-Fi facilities on several trains to cater to increasing aspirations and requirement of youth and other passengers. Another 60 stations will be upgraded as Adarsh or 'ideal' stations.
The Minister also said that he will put in place a next generation e-ticketing system to bring about a paradigm shift in internet rail ticketing. The new system will be able to support 7200 tickets per minute as against 2000 tickets per minute at present. It will support 1, 20,000 simultaneous users at any point in time against the present capacity of 40,000 users with capability to easily scale up as demand increases in future. The Minister said, the system will make use of advanced fraud control and security management tools thereby further improving fairness and transparency in disbursal of tickets.
The Minister announced other IT initiatives for the benefit of passengers:
- Extending availability of the facility of internet ticketing from 0030 hours to 2330 hours;
- Making e-ticketing possible through mobile phones;
- As a follow up to overwhelming response to Indian Railway website and Integrated Train Enquiry Service under “139”, a project of SMS Alerts to passengers providing updates on reservation status is being rolled out shortly;
- Covering larger number of trains under Real Time Information System (RTIS), whereby rail-users will be able to access information through nominated websites and mobile phones.  ( source: Press Information Bureau)