MADURAI: The Indian Railways and Railway Protection Force (RPF) is coming soon with a series of hi-tech measures to address the problem of train ticket brokers and touts who are indulging in black-marketing particularly during peal travel periods.
Railway authorities in the country are ready with an action plan in association with RPF, Commercial Department and IRCTC to combat black marketing of train tickets and ensure equitable access to train tickets for legitimate passengers.
A major initiative planned in this direction by the RPF is to integrate advanced technologies and predictive measures into its operations by focusing on key areas such as deploying of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, behavioural patterns analysis through AI systems which will scrutinize train ticket booking behaviours to identify anomalies indicative of touting activities, real-time fraud detection by Machine Learning algorithms to detect and halt suspicious booking transactions in real time and dynamic IP monitoring which will identify and block multiple ticket bookings originating from the same IP address or utilizing VPNs.
Biometric verification that includes facial recognition by linking train ticket bookings to biometric data will ensure passenger verification during inspections, finger print scanning, mandatory bio-metric authentication at booking counters are some of the steps that are planned by the RPF and Indian Railways to curb the brokers and touts, according to a press release issued by Southern Railway yesterday-January 20th 2025- with inputs taken from Mr.G.M.Eswara Rao, Inspector General and Principal Chief Security Commissioner, Southern Railway.
The RPF is also going to focus on cloud computing and big data analytics to identify suspicious trends in train tickets booking and give a predictive analysis so that action can be taken swiftly for routes and travel seasons that are vulnerable to touting activities and ticket brokers, the Southern Railway press release has said and added that technology integration coupled with digital surveillance of online booking platforms will help in a big way to combat black marketing, brokers and touts in the railway tickets booking system in India.
