Bhubaneswar: Country’s biggest public transporter, the Indian Railways has now decided to offer train tickets printed in Odia language for the welfare of passengers traveling to and from Odisha.
The new tickets to be printed in local vernacular language-Odia apart from Hindi and English, will be available from April 1 on the occasion of Utkal Divas at 317 stations in Odisha under the jurisdictions of East Coast Railway, South Eastern Railway & South East Central Railway, a press release issued by the Railways stated.
‘The train tickets having Odia script would be applicable for Unreserved Tickets bought manually from the Railway counters in Odisha,’ the statement said.
The Railways has taken the new passenger-friendly initiative with the help of technical support from CRIS, Kolkata.
According to reports, the East Coast Railway has prepared a database of more than 8000 station names in Odia Script to match with the vernacular name of the station as per the local language of that particular area.
People of the State who used to face problems with reading English & Hindi languages on train tickets and who did not know if they had the right tickets or their intended originating and destination stations as well as class of travel and train type are correct or not, will now be benefited by the decision.
It is pertinent to mention that Union Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had earlier sought Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal’s intervention to explore the option of printing rail tickets in local vernacular language, i.e. Odia.