In the years 1997-98, we got IBA (RBI) approval for security printing and since then we have maintained this accreditation. Then, one of our objectives for having this accreditation was to enable us to print and supply railway tickets. As Railways was not considering the printing companies without this accreditation, we felt it necessary to get the IBA approval. Thus after getting the IBA approval, we started serving Indian Railways by supplying them with printed tickets. We started with their UTS tickets i.e. tickets for Unreserved Ticketing System. This helped them greatly.

Mumbai being the biggest town of India and having many work opportunities, Indian citizen from across the India used to come and they are still coming to Mumbai and settling in Mumbai. For commuting locally, their first choice is always a local train as it is cheaper and faster. Thus when the number of passengers were increasing for the local suburban trains of the Mumbai Region, the queues at the ticketing counters were getting longer and longer and passengers used to spend a lot of their valuable time standing in the queues. Even the crowd in the local trains is ever increasing. To cater to this Railways was not only increasing the frequency of running the trains but also opening up additional ticketing counters at every station. Still the counters were overcrowded, then we helped Railways by implementing the self-stamping ticket coupon booklets. Passengers can buy these booklets on the counter once and consume the tickets as they travel; based on the journey fare they are supposed to stamp the date by themselves through the stamping machines which are installed at multiple locations on every station. In this booklets we provided coupons of different denominations so that the tickets of any value could be stamped and validated. This solution reduced the frequency of a passenger going to ticketing counters by average 75% which reduced the crowd at the counters and thus it was a huge success. This innovative product gave us a good amount of business from Railways for 4-5 years. However, the crowd of passengers was still increasing and there was a need for a better solution.

Then we helped railways in developing an alternate ticketing system that used self-service kiosks and thermal tickets, of which the thermal tickets were developed by us. The solution was referred to as ATVM. Automatic Ticket Vending Machines (ATVM) are Smart Card based ticket vending machines introduced by IR to reduce passenger queues at ticket counters. These are touch screen based ticketing kiosks connected to UTS Server. We produce and supply the consumables i.e. tickets for this vending machines. On these ATVM kiosks, any passenger can choose the journey points and avail the thermal paper based tickets by paying the appropriate amount through the Smart Cards. To motivate passengers to use this solution, they are given 5% additional value on recharge as bonus. Ex: If they recharge for Rs. 100 then total value on the card will be Rs 105.

This solution is still being used from the inception in 2007 and this is a huge success for us. We have been supplying different types of tickets to all the divisions of the Indian Railways. Till date we have supplied over 7 billion tickets and a considerable amount of other revenue collecting products such as receipt books, EFT books, etc. We have also supplied tickets to Kochi Metro.

We are associated with Indian Railways for more than 25 years and we have not only worked as vendor but also one of their Innovation Partners throughout their journey of revenue collecting products like normal tickets, to coupon booklets to ATVM tickets. We are proud of providing innovative solutions to Railways.