Sunday, February 21, 2010

Use mobile to save paper: a really implementable Idea!

From over past couple of months we have been watching Idea ads giving us ideas of how to use mobile to save paper. I dare not say that any of those ideas is 'impossible' to implement but you will agree that all of them will take much more efforts than just 'walk and talk'.

But a very easy way to save paper is to abolish the necessity of carrying printouts of tickets booked online. Think for a moment, when was the last you visited a Railway reservation office (except when not trying for Tatkal at the time of some major festival!) to book your tickets. We always book the tickets online and more often than not the printout is 2 pages instead of 1. Same goes with bus tickets booked on redbus.in or ticketvala.com.

Most of the cinemas these days let you collect the tickets just if you show the credit card with which you booked the tickets hence eradicating the need of printing the email confirmation.

IRCTC can take passenger's mobile number and send an SMS confirmation when a ticket is booked. TTEs should accept this SMS confirmation or the email confirmation (accessed on your mobile) sent by IRCTC.

Considering the fact that IRCTC is country's biggest e-commerce contributor and does one third of all tickets sold by Indian Railways, you can understand the number of tickets printed in India and if we cut down the tickets printed we can save a lot of paper.

More over just think of not worrying about printing tickets when not booking tickets from office ;)

6 comments:

Essjay said...

Sir, what a coincidence, few days back even I was thinking the same. Really this must be implemented. It'll save lots of paper as % of e-tickets usage is increasing day by day. Drop a suggestion to Railway ministry. They must be having some mail id for the same. In fact all departments of govt should have a mail id where citizens can send their ideas.

Dev said...

IRCTC is already sending confirmation of booking details through SMS. The thing TT should accept that SMS.

Essjay said...

Another Idea for the railways, they can think of installing LED display in coach which keep on displaying current location of the train, next station and expected arrival time. Many times while traveling in night I keep wondering whether train is running on time or it has got delayed.

Pawan Pilla said...

I am not sure if this counts, but what's your take on this one ?
Whenever you cross an institute(more so a software teaching one), you find so many pamphlets being strewn across the road by mindless people who just take the leaflet for "God knows who"'s sake. Also, the pamphlets that are distributed in our own gateway. What about them ?

Unknown said...

this facility was present from 2004 it self.

Essjay said...

@Pawan. Yes you are absolutely correct. But we can play our part by not accepting the pamphlet from the distributor. Yes, with osme though we can come up with some solution to that. One is ban it just like polythene has been banned. But does not seems to be feasible.