Trial Run of e-ticketing at Qutb Minar

Trial Run of e-ticketing at Qutb Minar

Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), as part of the automization programme, shall put on operation the trial run of e-ticketing at Qutb Minar from 1st October, 2012 for a period of one month. The period of the trial run shall be w.e.f. 01.10.2012 to 31.10.2012, both dates included.

The exercise is being undertaken to find out the suitability of the system for public and also to assess the short-comings in the system. The system has been designed by the National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) on experimental basis. The basic idea to introduce e-ticketing for the monuments is to make the current manual system of issue of paper tickets hassle free so that the visitors are not required to stand in queues wasting precious time. The system is also proposed to take care of better accounting of revenue collected, store data on visitors and minimise the possibility of malpractices in the current manual system.

During 01.10.2012 to 31.10.2012, the period of the trial run, e-ticket for individuals and also group of visitors may be purchased from the ticket counters at Qutb Minar. During this period, manual tickets will not be available at Qutb Minar. The system to be tested at Qutb Minar shall be based upon the bar-code technology as it is simple and easy to use. The ticket counters shall be open for issuance of tickets through e-POS system. During the 30 days trial run the system will be properly monitored and audited by the NISG experts and ASI officials to find out the lacunae for further improvisation of the technology.

Currently, entry into 116 monuments in the country, under the control of ASI, is through entry tickets. ASI has plans to introduce e-ticketing at all such ticketed monuments in phases after the technology to be used is firmed up and bottle-necks removed. Qutb Minar has purposely been selected for trial run since it is the second most visited monument in the country, only after the Taj Mahal. Once the technology selected for e-ticketing is found successful at Qutb Minar, its introduction at other monuments shall become easy.