To

The president

SRMU

Chennai

Sir, 
We have started TAMILNADU E-TICKET AGENTS WELFARE ASSOCIATION in Tamilandu. Our association office is situated at Madurai. We have Registered this association as per Tamilnadu govt. registration act. (Regd. no: 124/2010) at Madurai. In our association 350 active members and 300 prospective members are part of. We are doing TRAIN e-ticket booking services to general public. Our members are the authorized licensed agents of IRCTC. We have invested considerable amount as capital in this business. There are more than 13000 e-ticket agents in Tamilnadu  and more than 150000 agents are booking railway e-tickets all over India and e-ticket booking system giving more than 60% business in passenger reservation with good profit to IRCTC and INDIAN RAILWAY. Now we are facing lot of problems by the new rules implemented by Indian railways and IRCTC. After the implementation of the new rules, our business is in trouble and it is affected our earnings and creates many economic problems in our life. 

Our Demands:

 1. When we started this business we were allowed to book all tickets without any time restriction and this helped our customers a lot, particularly women and aged persons, people from villages who are unable to go to reservation counters in the morning and wait for a long time in the queue to book Tatkal and other tickets. But now the reservation of tatkal, general and tickets opened for booking before 60 days in advance (opening day tickets) are restricted for e ticket agents during the morning business hours from 8.00 A.M to 12.00 Noon. We request IRCTC and Indian Railways should lift this restriction and allow us to do business throughout the day.

2. Principle agents of IRCTC appointed more than 1,50,000 sub agents  for booking railway e-tickets all over India. These principle agents were collected Rs. 10,000 to Rs. 20,000 from each sub agents for giving IRCTC license and the ticket booking software and as an approximate value more than Rs.200 crore were collected from the sub agents. Besides these, principle agents are charging Rs. 2000 to Rs. 3000 every year from each agent for issuing digital certificates and renew the IRCTC license. Some principal agents collected Rs.5000 to Rs. 20000 as deposits for IRCTC booking service from the sub agents and now they are not ready to refund this amount to the sub agents. We request IRCTC should intervene in this issue to reduce and regulate the license fee collected by the principal agents, refund the deposits to sub agents and all the principal agent should follow the same rule implemented by IRCTC.

3. Principal agents are collecting transactions for ticket booking. Now they charged the transaction charges as they wish. IRCTC should regulate the Transaction charges collected by the Principal agents.

4. Subagent Service charge collected from the passenger for booking e-tickets is fixed before 20 years back when the IRCTC started business through e ticket booking agents, this service charge remains the same as Rs.10 for sleeper and second sitting class and Rs.20 for all other upper classes. We request subagent’s service charge should increased periodically depends on the consumer price index and the subagents service charges should be fixed per passenger basis and not per PNR basis.

5. Blocking of e ticket agent’s log in id’s without any explanation or valuable reason is illegitimate. This action of IRCTC is against the natural justice. So we request you to take necessary actions to release the blocked login id’s and activate them for doing the ticket booking services.

6. Now IRCTC insisting the sub agents to send email for File TDR process. We request IRCTC should allow the sub agents to submit the TDR request through the IRCTC agent portal as given earlier.

7. Appoint e ticket agents as Indian railways zonal committee member in all the zones to represent e-ticket booking problems / passenger’s problems.

We request you to take necessary actions to solve the above problems faced by public and agents as early as possible. As many of our members are invested considerable amount and doing this business as self employment, we assure you that we will extend our full support and cooperation to IRCTC and Indian Railways to make the e-ticket booking smooth.