Railway ministry to scrap CVMs
CR officials said the CVM coupons available with passengers would be permitted for use for a month’s period.
There are 658 Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVMs) on CR, with a recent addition to their numbers.Following reports of widespread misuse of the railway coupon books, the Ministry of Railways has decided to discontinue the operation of Coupon Validating Machines (CVM) on the Central Railway (CR) as well as on Western Railway (WR). The sale of CVM coupons will be discontinued from April 1, 2015.
However CR officials said the CVM coupons available with passengers would be permitted for use for a month’s period – commuters can get these stamped at the ticket counters in order to validate them.
“The Ministry of Railways was supposed to discontinue CVM coupons last year but postponed it as the alternative arrangement needed to be made. The main reason was the huge misuse and fraud taking place, it was leading to major revenue loss to the Railways,” said Narendra Patil, Chief Public Relations Officer, CR.
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“The usage is limited to only 4 per cent overall. There were reports of commuters taking colour copies of the CVM coupon and it was a tough task for the ticket checkers to identify the duplicate from the original ones. Also, the passengers found it difficult to understand the punching and valuation of the CVM coupons,” added Patil.
At the same time, there are 658 Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVMs) on CR, with a recent addition to their numbers.
The WR has 457 ATVMs machines installed between Churchgate and Dahanu Road. “A total of approximately 78,000 passengers avail the tickets from the ATVMs,” said Sharat Chandrayan, Chief Public Relations Officer, WR.
“The CR is committed to provide facilities to its customers in all possible ways. To reduce long queues at booking counters it came up with other modes of ticketing systems such as JTBS (Jansadharan Ticket Booking Sevaks), ATVMs and recently launched Unreserved Mobile Ticketing system . Amongst all the sale of tickets, sale through ATVMs is about 21 per cent of total sale of tickets thereby reducing the queues on counters considerably. JTBS also accounts for about 21 per cent and to purchase a ticket through ATVM the passenger has to purchase a Smart Card first which can be recharged as per requirement. The passenger is benefited with five per cent more value, that is, with the charging of Rs 100, the passenger can purchase the tickets valued at Rs 105,” Patil said.
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