Unreserved railway tickets, bought by 16 million pasengers daily in India, will soon be available through cell phones, thanks to a major IT initiative of the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS).

“We have developed the software for providing unreserved tickets through SMS on cell phones. We are in talks with various service providers and hope to make it a reality soon,’’ CRIS General Manager (R&D) R Badri Narayan said on Friday.

Narayan said talks were in an advanced stage with companies like Oxigen (Gurgaon, Haryana) and M-Chek (Bangalore).  “We are fully prepared with the software; only certain security matters have to be taken care of to make the system glitch-free before it is launched.’’

Besides, passengers travelling unreserved can purchase their tickets at any station across the country in about two years when the railway ministry extends the recently introduced Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) to 21,000 points of sale from the current 3,700 points.

Disclosing this, CRIS officials noted that at present, the 24x7 UTS covered 165 stations and it would be extended to all the 6,275 stationsin the next two years. 

At present, UTS caters to 10 million passengers. Nine million of the total 16 million unreserved passengers are intra-city commuters. According to Narayan, 53 per cent of the revenue that IR earns from passenger services comes from the unreserved segment. About 80 per cent of this revenue from the unreserved segment comes through the UTS. About 60 per cent of the unreserved tickets gets IR up to Rs 20 crore a day.