Bhubaneswar: The unreserved railway tickets available through station counters for passengers in Odisha are now all set to be printed in Odia language to cater to the needs of the people from the state.
The East Coast Railway (ECoR) has now come forward with the plan to ensure that the unreserved tickets issued by the railway department under their jurisdiction and most of the railway stations in Odisha are printed in Odia script besides the earlier method of printing it in English and Hindi alone.
“The Commercial Department of the ECoR, after painstaking work in the last few months, has made database of 8000 railway stations and now all railway stations in Odisha can offer tri-lingual tickets which will have details in Odia, English and Hindi so that no one is at any disadvantage,” an official from the ECoR told Orissa POST.
The railway department has decided that the tickets will be available in Odia from Utkal Diwas (April 1) across all railway station counters of Odisha. Around 317 railway stations in Odisha are likely to come onboard the system to provide relief to passengers who found it tough to read English and Hindi letters on tickets leading to confusions.
A press release from ECoR on the matter said, “So many people from Odisha who had problems with reading English and Hindi on train tickets and who did not know if they had the right tickets — their intended originating and destination stations as well as class of travel and train type are correct or not — can now read the same in Odia script.”
The project got an impetus by the technical support from Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) Kolkata while the ECoR prepared the database of more than 8000 station names in Odia script. The department claims that steps have been taken to print the station names in Odia script to match with the vernacular name of the stations as per the local language of that particular area of the country. The department also issued samples of the tri-lingual tickets to be available from the next financial year.