Hundreds of railway ticket seekers have been suffering for last five days following ‘link failure’ at the reservation counter functioning inside the Collector’s office here. The officials have said that the situation has arisen due to interruption in internet service of the BSNl.
The reservation counter internet link had crashed on November 20. Reservation clerk Biswajit Parida had informed the Indian Railways Signal and Telecom department about the fault. Immediately the department had registered a case bearing number 05/ 20-11-2014 and asked service provider BSNl, Jagatsinghpur circle, to sort out the difficulty forthwith.
However, the BSNl authority has not been able to fix the problem in the centre till date leading to immense trouble for the passengers seeking reservation, cancellation and booking of Tatkal tickets.
One, Devendra Singh who had booked his rail ticket in the Jagatsinghpur railways reservation counter said on Saturday he opted to cancel his journey ticket. But following non-functioning of the counter, he was forced to move to Cuttack for the purpose.
Similar hardship was felt by another youth, Biswambar Das, who had come to the counter on Monday for booking a Tatkal ticket for journey to Bangalore for attending an interview. As the counter was out of service, he had to move to Bhubaneswar for getting the ticket.
Examples of such troubles being faced by people are numerous. An official report informed that about 100 reservation tickets are usually made at the centre daily including about 20 to 30 Tatkal tickets while about 30 to 40 tickets are cancelled daily. The collection of the counter per day is Rs47,000 to Rs60,000, informed clerk Parida.
Meanwhile a BSNl official admitted that internet service had not been restored to the reservation counter. He attributed it to damages in connection cable wire. He however said, “We detected the fault on Monday. The service would be restored as soon as possible.”
Sources further informed that cable stretching work by a private telecom provider is under progress in Jagatsinghpur town, which has caused damages to the existing wires during digging.