The rule would apply for both online and counter tickets, which means booking a train wouldn’t be possible without an Aadhaar card.
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As we had shared earlier, this is the biggest push for Aadhaar based ecosystem to be ever implemented in India.
The Indian Railways may soon make it mandatory for senior citizen passengers to provide their Aadhaar numbers to avail concessions on rail tickets.
According to the directive, Aadhaar Cards would be compulsory for both reserved and unreserved categories. As per recent data, over 96% of Indians already have an Aadhaar Card.
Also, till now, only those railway passengers who booked their tickets online, could avail of travel insurance.
The new regulations will come into effect from December 2016. The Indian Railways roughly provides concessions across over 50 categories.
There are innumerable advantages of linking Aadhaar with train bookings, as there would be a centralized, well documented and live database of passengers which can be immensely useful for various purposes.
The move is aimed at tackling the menace of touts who block tickets in advance under fictitious names and passengers often do not get tickets in advance as bulk tickets are being cornered by touts.
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He further said that IRCTC was likely to incentivise all passengers to book rail tickets through Aadhaar by offering them several sops. Earlier, the lack of proper database of people travelling in unreserved coaches made it extremely hard to cover every passenger.
