100-yr-old? Railway PRS computer will not accept it

Mumbai, May 20 (UNI) The Railways, which turned 155 last month, do not seem to be for people who are of 100 years or above in age, thanks to the computerised Passenger Reservation system (PRS).

The Passenger Reservation System (PRS), designed and developed by the Railways nodal IT agency, Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), does not accept passengers whose age is in three figures and has inconvenienced one 100-year-old Girgaon resident here.

The flaw in the technology came to light when Pandharinath Pathare's son went to book a ticket for his family including his 100-year-old father for Goa by Konkan-Kanya Express at a CR booking counter in Mumbai.

However, the booking clerk refused to accept the form, asking him to write his father's age as either 98 or 99 (two-digit) since there was no provision for the third digit in the age column in the software.

According to the census officials, there were some 1,39,472 persons in the country of 100 years or above in age.

When the software was developed, it was taken for granted that people of that age group would not travel by rail, said a central railway official, adding it was the first case of its kind which had come to notice. Now steps would be taken to modify the software to remove such a technical glitch he said.

''The software has been developed on the basis of parameters provided to us by the Railway Ministry. We are open to any modification, but only when it comes from the Ministry itself,'' added a senior official from CRIS, New Delhi.

UNI