These rules of Railways have changed today, read this news before booking tickets

Railways has taken several important steps to simplify the journey of those traveling by train and to prevent fraudsters in the process of booking tickets online. These rules are coming into effect from today i.e. July 1.

Rail journey starts with booking tickets and Railways has taken several steps to make it simple and convenient. Union Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav reviewed these changes and said that the ticketing system should be smart, transparent, accessible and effective. Passenger convenience should be given priority, so that passengers traveling by train can get a comfortable and comfortable experience.

In the current system, the reservation chart is made four hours before the departure of the train, due to which there is uncertainty among the passengers. Especially those people who come to catch the train from far off areas face a lot of problems. Now the Railway Board has decided to prepare the chart eight hours before the departure of the train.

If a train is scheduled to depart before 2 pm, the chart will be prepared at 9 pm the day before. The Railway Minister has also agreed to this proposal and directed to implement it in a phased manner, so that there is no interruption.

The purpose behind this move is that passengers with waiting tickets will know the status of their tickets quickly. If needed, they will get more time to make alternative arrangements for their journey. This will especially benefit passengers coming from remote or urban suburbs.

Railways is also preparing to change to the modern Passenger Reservation System (PRS) by December 2025. Railway Minister Vaishnav reviewed the progress of the new PRS system. CRIS has also been working on this project for the last few months. The new system will be more flexible, efficient and capable of handling ten times more than the existing load. Under this, the ticket booking capacity will increase, which will increase from the current 32,000 per minute to 1.5 lakh tickets per minute.

Apart from this, the inquiry capacity will also increase from 4 lakh to 40 lakh per minute. New features like multilingual and user-friendly interface, seat option selection facility, fare calendar, options for Divyangjan, students, patients etc. will also be added.

Railways will allow booking of Tatkal tickets only to authenticated users from July 1, 2025. Also, OTP based verification will also be made mandatory on IRCTC website/app by the end of July. The authentication system for Tatkal booking will be expanded and this verification will be done through Aadhar card number or any government identity card available in DigiLocker.