The Indian Railway has introduced new system to speed-up the process of e-ticket refunds of the cancelled train tickets that were booked through IRCTC website.

Named Advanced Coaching Refund System (ACRS), the new refund process will reduce the time of refunding from 30 days to 15 days. According to the new system, all the e-tickets’ data will be uploaded from IRCTC to ACRS, which will be under direct functioning of refund section in Chief Commercial Manager’s Office at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai.

All the approved refunds will be sent to IRCTC from ACRS through individual pay orders and the same would be forwarded to the passengers manually. That way, the money will not be transferred to the account directly but will be send via demand draft.

Although the time would be reduced, people are unlikely to welcome this new system as the pay orders that are received manually should again be deposited into accounts by the passengers who cancelled their tickets. And it would take another two or three days besides a person may be not be free to go down to a bank and then deposit the DD into account. If any passenger has that much time, then he/she would not book e-ticket.

Anyway, we have to wait and watch to know what would be the response from the public over the new refund system.  (Phani)