Disruption in Bangladesh Railway’s online ticket selling continued for the second consecutive day on Sunday.
A huge number of people suffered as the railway’s online portal (eticket.railway.gov.bd) went inoperative on Saturday following the resumption of online ticket selling after a five-day break.
The portal resumed working partially on Sunday but many complained that it was working slowly. Some said it was not working at all.
People also complained about the slow pace in getting tickets at counters in different stations.
Officials of the railway said that it would take a few more days to restore normal services.
Meanwhile, there is no announcement on the resumption of ticket selling through any mobile app till Sunday night.
On Sunday, when the online portal was opened for ticket selling at 8:00am, many people alleged that they could not enter it.
‘I’m a new user and that’s why I tried to register on the website to buy a ticket,’ said Tajreen Ahmed, a resident of Dhaka.
She tried to complete the registration at 12:20pm and was supposed to receive a text message with an OTP number immediately, but the message came at 1:20pm.
She said that due to this delay she could not buy tickets.
The number of people standing in queues at Kamalapur rail station in Dhaka was almost normal in the afternoon.
Md Afsar Uddin, Kamalapur station master, told New Age that the crowd of people at the station’s ticket counters on Sunday was fewer than Saturday.
The railway sold tickets of all trains manually for five days from March 20 to March 25 before the handing over of the Integrated Ticketing System to a new joint venture company.
On February 15, the railway signed a contract with Shohoz-Synesis-Vincen JV to ‘more effectively’ operate the ticketing system through open tender for the next five years from March 26.
In a press conference held on March 14, railways minister Nurul Islam Sujan said that as per the contract the new vendor would replace the existing CCSRTS system with the BRITS system within the next 18 months.
The previous vendor was CNS Limited.
The railways minister on Sunday told a private television channel that they were yet to judge whether the new vendor had failed or not.
Currently, the railway sells about 90,000 tickets daily and about 27 lakh tickets monthly for 104 intercity trains from 77 stations and half of them are sold at counters.
Till March 20, the remaining half of the tickets were sold through eticket.railway.gov.bd portal and Rail Sheba mobile app.
Railways ministry officials said that Rail Sheba mobile app was owned by previous vendor CNS Limited and that the app would not be used anymore.
The railway at 8:00am on Saturday began selling half of the train tickets at counters and the rest half online at eticket.railway.gov.bd portal.
Many customers started complaining that they could not get access to the website. The situation did not improve till Saturday night prompting many people to rush to railways stations for tickets.
Shohoz Ltd public relations manager Farhat Ahmed told New Age that between 8:00am and 12:00pm on Sunday they sold around 7,000 online tickets via the portal.
Still, many people are hitting the website, which made it go slow from time to time, he said.
Farhat earlier told reporters that they had still 18 months time to develop the system, which was operated by CNS Limited in the past 15 years. He said that it would take a few days for them to restore normal services.
Between 6:00pm on March 25 and 12:00am on March 26 they sold around 45,000 tickets and between 8:00am and 12:00pm on Saturday they sold around one lakh tickets from counters at 77 rail stations across the coun Jtry, he added.
Bangladesh Railway addition al director general (operation) Sardar Shahdat Ali told New Age that they were also getting complaints from people about not getting access to the website on Sunday.
Due to technical issues, it was also taking time to issue tickets at the counters, he said.
‘We will ask Shohoz to solve these issues within a few days,’ he added.
BR director for public relations Nahid Hasan Khan earlier on Saturday said that they were working on introducing a new mobile app for ticketing.
-With New Age input
