In 1982,Government conceived a project for analysing a Freight Operations Information Systems(FOIS)with Railways Subsequently in 1986,Ministry of Railways established the

CENTRE FOR RAILWAY INFORMATION SYSTEMS (CRIS), Chanakya Puri, New Delhi - 21 to be an umbrella organisation for all computer activities on Indian Railways (IR).They also entrusted it with the task of design, development and implementation of the FOIS, alongwith its associated communications infrastructure. The Centre started functioning from July,1987.It is a registered society having an autonomous status and headed by Managing Director .CRIS is mainly a project oriented organisation engaged in development of major computer systems on the Railways. Our presence across the country gives us global reach and a vast rollout support capability. Together with our formidable team of high-caliber software professionals we have successfully positioned ourselves at the vanguard of the global IT service s revolution. With such a rich practical experience, a dedicated team of professionals and its own R&D effort, CRIS aims to be a leader in this fast developing field. CRIS provides consulting and IT services to Indian Railways - as partners to conceptualize and realize technology driven business transformation initiatives. With over 200 employees nationwide, we use a low-risk Delivery Model to accelerate schedules with a high degree of time and cost predictability. We provide solutions for a dynamic environment where business and technology strategies converge. Our approach focuses on new ways of business combining IT innovation and adoption while also leveraging an organization's current IT assets. We work with Indian Railways to build new products or services and to implement prudent business and technology strategies in today's dynamic digital environment. Twenty million passengers travel daily on Indian Railways using the unreserved journey facility. An unreserved ticket authorizes these journeys but as the name implies, offers no reserved seats or berths. The ticket is not specific to a train service either. This facility is predominantly used by commuters and suburban travelers over short distances where assured seating is not a necessity. It is also available to lower income groups travelling longer distances and connects the rural hinterland to districts, towns and cities. Tickets are issued to the unreserved passenger any time of day or night as booking offices remain open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Unreserved Ticketing System (UTS) caters to this segment of the market and seeks to provide a centrally administered computerized ticketing system over the entire Indian Railways. Today more than ninety percent of the unreserved tickets are sold through this system. The ability of the system to deliver ticketing at remote corners of the country and provide uninterrupted services everywhere has been lauded by the Government of India and the project along with the CRIS team responsible for its initial design and implementation won the Prime Ministers Award for Excellence in Public Administration. The application has been developed with a 3 layered architecture in C++. The database requirements are met through a Sybase product, ASE-CE. A Java version of the application is used in the ATVMs to provide additional features in the user interface.

Currently the hardware is deployed across 08 data centres. To cater to the expansion of the user base for this application, the existing setup is being migrated to a high-end Virtualized setup. This is the first time that Virtualization has been implemented for an IR application. The backend setup has a provision to support Business Continuity ensuring a nearly 100% uptime for the application. Besides this at the client end the so called Smart Clients have been deployed which are basically thin clients with a footprint of RDBMS and application image. These ensure continuous business operations in the event of network / backend outage. The application rides on the Unified Ticketing Network (UTN) for Passenger Reservation System and Unreserved Ticketing System. The printing device is a customized Dot Matrix Printer. However in case of ATVMs, Thermal Printers are being used. CRIS works as the coordinating agency for procurement of peripheral equipment for the Zonal Railways. Specifications of the equipment used at stations are available here. For details on current procurements please go to our section on Tender Notices. 1. Dot Matrix Ticket Printers (view/download) 2. Dot Matrix Report Printers (view/download) 3. Dumb Terminals (view/download) 4. Thin Clients (view/download) The Unreserved Ticketing Services group is part of the commercial applications division within CRIS working under the guidance of S. B. Roy, Director (Passenger Reservation Services). The group is currently led by Dr. R. Badri Narayan, General Manager, an Indian Railway Traffic Service officer with more than 20 years experience. He has been heading the UTS group for more than three years now. He is assisted by P. K. Varshney, Chief Manager who is a domain knowledge expert. The technical team is led by Monica Malhotra, Chief Systems Manager. Monica has been heading the group for 8 years and has more than 15 years experience in the IT industry. The rest of the team includes software engineers and managers spread across the CRIS regional offices at New Delhi, Gorakhpur, Patna, Kolkata, Secunderabad, Chennai and Mumbai.