Metro railway rolls out UPI in all stations under North-South corridor

After the Howrah Maidan-Esplanade and Sector V-Sealdah corridors of the East-West Metro, UPI payment-based ticketing system has been introduced in all automatic smart card recharge machines (ASCRM) at all stations of the North-South corridor connecting the two outskirts of the city.

The Metro Railway Kolkata said in a statement on Sunday, all ASCRM machines of Blue Line (Dakshineswar-New Garia) now have this facility so more and more commuters are purchasing tokens or recharging their smart cards from these machines without any hassle.

"... If a commuter wants to travel to DumDum he has to type the first letter of the station i.E. D only on the screen then an auto-pop-up will come on the screen showing all the station's name starting with D. After that, he/she needs to select the station name on the screen and then the payment page will appear. On the payment page, option of UPI Payment will be displayed and then after selecting the UPI Payment option required payment can be made by scanning the QR code with the help of smart phone," it said.

This ticketing system has already been introduced in all stations of Green Line 1 and Green Line 2.

Seeing the huge response of Metro users, authorities are contemplating extending this alternative ticketing facility to the Ruby-New Garia and Joka-Taratala section as well for the benefit of the commuters soon, it said.

Metro Railway authorities with the help of State Bank of India and Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) have introduced this Unified Payments Interface (UPI) Based Ticketing System.