Home-goers suffered tremendously online and offline and waited for hours in the queue for train tickets at Kamalapur Railway Station in Dhaka on Saturday as Bangladesh Railway began advance ticket selling ahead of Eid-ul-Fitr. According to newspaper reports, many people standing in the queue at Kamalapur complained about difficulties in accessing the railway’s website to purchase online tickets, which they said forced them to stay in the queue for hours. Even standing in the queue for five to ten hours in front of the booth, a large number of them had to return home without tickets.
Information Technology experts said the low capacity to take pressure at a time had been the basic problem of railway’s online ticketing services. Officials of a joint venture of Shohoz Ltd, Synesis IT Ltd and Vincen Consultancy Pvt Ltd have been designated to control servers at 77 stations across the country. Reportedly, troubles with the train tickets began on March 26 when Shohoz-Synesis-Vincen joint venture officially took over the charge of the Integrated Ticketing System as a huge number of people struggled to find access to the website, which went down following the resumption of online ticket selling after a five-day break.
Earlier on February 15, the railway signed a contract with the joint venture companies to ‘more effectively’ operate the ticketing system for five years from March 26. The suffering in getting online train tickets continued despite the appointment of the new company, passengers alleged. Advanced train tickets sales for Eid home-goers began at 8:00am on Saturday in five spots — Kamalapur, Airport, Cantonment, Tejgaon railway stations and at Fulbaria in the capital.
Replying to an allegation that tickets are in the black market, the Kamalapur Railway Station Manager claims there is no chance of tickets going to black market. “Our law enforcement agencies, including Railway Police, Rapid Action Battalion and Detective Branch, are working to prevent scalpers. Trains have the capacity of ferrying 50,000 passengers per day but a higher number of passengers hit the online platform to get advance tickets. We can’t provide tickets for all of them.”
There are allegations that online tickets are being sold on the black market, despite the authorities’ promise to put an end to illegal sales. Many passengers at Kamalapur Railway Station also alleged that they have been paying to buy tickets from black marketers at the station with high prices.
