BANGLADESH being a densely populated country, there are queues everywhere for different services -- banks, hospital outdoors and medical centres, bus and railway ticket counters and so on. Bus service providers recently introduced online ticketing system which reduced the pressure of passengers before ticket counters and helped them save a lot of time. On the contrary it is extremely difficult for passengers to manage a train ticket with a seat. Tickets can be procured from railway station counters and few other specialised mobile phone customer care centres but very few people know about their locations and services.
The Bangladesh Railway (BR) introduced online ticketing service alongside all other ticketing services where one could buy a ticket through the internet and make payment through online money transfer by credit card or mobile banking. Obviously, it is a great initiative to have a digitised railway service for the nation. But in reality the situation is otherwise. Most of the time passengers cannot buy a ticket through online portal due to a limited number of seat allocation, technical problem, server problem etc. As a result, the railway is losing a huge number of passengers every day and people have to opt for alternative ways of travelling. As a result, railway cannot earn desired profit despite being the most comfortable means of communication. It could easily be a profitable sector if higher number of seats were allocated for online ticketing system along with uninterrupted internet service. The railway authorities should also review their personnel recruitment strategy and recruit qualified human resources for making railways a user-friendly facility and ensure sustainable management of the organisation. We sincerely hope the authorities will be able to recover its lost goodwill and reputation and a broad spectrum of people will prefer train as a transport of safe and comfortable journey.
Arif Ahmed
Researcher
arifahmed.bgd@gmail.com
Bangladesh Railway's e-ticketing service
FE Team | Published: May 06, 2018 20:48:25
Bangladesh Railway's e-ticketing service
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