The 'unreserved ticketing system' developed by Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), the IT arm of the ministry of railways has received the prime minister's award for excellence in public administration for the year 2006-2007.

The award was conferred by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh at a function to commemmorate Civil Service Day, in NEw Delhi yesterday.

The unreserved ticketing system has been developed to cater to 16 million unreserved passengers who need to travel on Indian Railways everyday. In addition to providing more than 3600 points of sale at 1300 locations on Indian Railways, this system provides a facility to passengers to purchase their tickets not only from the journey origination stations but also surrounding stations to reduce the queues at booking counters on major stations.

As an extension of unreserved ticketing system, CRIS has developed automatic ticket vending machines with a user friendly interface, which have become very popular in the Mumbai suburban area where more than 60,000 passengers purchase their journey tickets every day through these ATVMs.

A 28-member project team lead by Vikram Chopra, director operations,  CRIS, received the award on behalf of the Indian Railways from the Dr Singh.