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Journalism of Courage
Bus commuters in Delhi will soon be able to book tickets for bus rides in the city from WhatsApp. According to a report by PTI citing city officials, the Transport Department is working on rolling out the online bus ticketing system for DTC and cluster buses.
Similar to Delhi Metro’s WhatsApp ticketing system, which was introduced earlier this year, the digital ticketing solution will help commuters skip long queues and avoid the hassle of carrying cash and exchanging change. It can also be used to book bus tickets for friends and family if they run out of cash or don’t have any money with them.
However, there will be a cap on how many tickets a user can book. It is also likely that commuters won’t be able to cancel tickets once booked. If the implementation is similar to the DMRC WhatsApp ticketing solution, users will have to send a message with the text ‘Hi’ to a number to start the booking process.
Users might then be presented with options like ‘Buy Ticket’, ‘Last Journey Details’ and ‘Retrieve Ticket’. While you may have to pay a bit more if you book bus tickets using a debit or credit card, payments made using UPI won’t likely incur additional charges.
Last year, the Delhi government launched the ‘One Delhi’ app that lets users book e-tickets for buses, check the expected time of arrival track buses in real-time, and visualise bus and metro routers. It is available on both Android and iOS and can be downloaded for free from the respective app stores.
