How can Railways stop the forged ticket racket?

Rajesh Soundararajan
Feb 04, 2020
5 min read

..and yet maintain convenience for passengers

How can Railways stop the forged ticket racket?

When Western Railways issues season tickets for travel for its regular passengers, little do they expect that these tickets would be forged or misused. ‘Mumbai local’ trains transport 7 million passengers a day, moving almost the population of Belgium each day on the network. Most commuters opt to buy season tickets that are not just efficient and convenient but also economical.

When the lady ticket examiner, Ujwala Gowde, with an eye for detail ensured that a lady passenger, was apprehended at Dadar’s platform number 2 for carrying a fake season pass, it was just one of the many such cases that occur each day. For the railways, with just about a thousand ticket-checkers spread across the suburban system to check almost 45 lakh passes, a fraud like the one the lady has allegedly committed is extremely tough to check and could spell a financial disaster

https://www.dnaindia.com/mumbai/report-lady-with-fake-pass-gives-western-railway-food-for-thought-2065658

Spread over 427 km, Mumbai’s local trains run over three arterial routes that connect the city’s southern hubs to the suburbs located in the north going up to Dahanu in the west, beyond Kalyan in the northeast, and all the way through Navi Mumbai.

With thousands of commuters traveling on season tickets each day, how could one prevent the forgery and fraud of these tickets? The ticket examiners are unable to differentiate the fake from the original ticket since the fakes have started to look as good as the originals. This potentially causes losses worth millions to the railways.

A secure QR code embedded ticket is an incredible way of quickly, efficiently, and effectively curbing this menace.

How can Railways prevent such incidents of fraud?

All tickets issued by the Railways (online and at the counters) must be genuine and trustworthy. Irrespective of the format that is used - physical or electronic (the new UTSOnMobile) - easy verifiability forms an important basis to check the authenticity of the ticket. Such tickets would need to have an embedded ticket security solution that is both tamper-proof and easily verifiable by the Ticket Examiner. Such a solution will have two components

1. Ability to instantly generate/print a ticket with relevant information that is secure and tamper proof and non transferable.

2. Ensuring such tickets can be easily verified by the Ticket Examiner.

Any railway ticket issuance system needs to be able to do this to ensure that fraud and tampered tickets can be curbed

How can Railways implement a secure QR code solution on the ticketing system?

Implementing a secure QR code solution is straightforward and can be done in these simple steps

1. Add a Secure QR Code with details such as Passenger Name, Issuing Authority, From/ To, travel category, Validity, fare or any such important information inside the QR code.

2. This high-security code is tamper-proof and it can only be created by the centralized railway ticketing system either at the ticketing counter or even online for eTickets. These codes will be digitally signed by the private key of the issuer (railways).

3. The QR code is machine-readable, and the information inside can be compared with the information on the ticket using a mobile app or a web validation tool which can also verify the ticket’s authenticity.

4. The data remains private and confidential and need not reside on any database. Hence it is highly secure and it’s not possible to manipulate it after the generation of the code.

5. A significant advantage of such a QR code is that the validity can be extended by just updating the information at the back end on the server (when a season pass is renewed for a fresh period for example) which would get reflected on scanning the existing QR code on the ticket/season pass Without the need to issue a fresh ticket/season pass.

6. The validation mechanism used by the Ticket Examiner (and even the public) would be a web validation tool or a validator App that can scan the code and display the information for verification. If the information has been tampered with, the validation would fail.

7. Each QR code is unique for every ticket/season pass issued to a passenger. The technology can be easily integrated with the existing ticket issuing infrastructure and can handle the necessary processing volumes.

8. It works for both physical and electronic tickets.

A self-contained Secure QR code (called a primary data code - PDC- having only textual information) would work for offline verification without the need for data connectivity.

Here is a schematic that shows how this would look for a ticket with the secure QR code having the following specified fields