Indian Government is very serious to use the Aadhaar in productive ways and is trying to force users to get an Aadhar card. Recently, it made Aadhaar Card mandatory in different services, and now it had made it mandatory for booking train tickets.
As of now, this is only for online ticket bookings, but we can expect this to become mandatory even for offline booking from ticket counters.
Indian Railway official has confirmed the news and the company are working on a software for Aadhar verification during the booking process.
Also see: Aadhar card download
Users will link the Aadhar number in their IRCTC account. The ticket will automatically link with the Aadhar number and the same Aadhar card will be checked against the ticket. If you fail to show the same Aadhar card, your ticket will not be considered as valid.
With this step, Indian Railways wants to flush out unauthorized agents who book tickets in advance using online and offline mode. These agents then contact passengers and sell their pre-booked tickets at high rates.
The pilot project will start from April 1st. To start, Indian Railways will make it mandatory for all senior citizens to show their Aadhaar cards for getting senior citizen’s discounts on rail tickets. The success of this pilot project will then determine the feasibility of Aadhaar based ticketing.
I have tried to contact Indian Railways to get more details. Once I have mote information regarding this, I will update this article or add a new article. Stay tuned with us.
Indian Railway has also planned to introduce 6000 points of sales machine and 1000 ticket vending machines during 2017-2018 for cashless ticket booking at stations.
