You will be able to swipe your debit/credit card at railway ticket counter soon

Indian Railways is finally going cashless and will now have a Point of Sale (PoS) machines at its ticket booking counter. On the lines of demonetisation, the railways has asked banks such as State Bank of India (SBI) and ICICI, etc to provide nearly 15,000 PoS machines at reservation counters.

The machines are expected to be made available by Dec 31. Presently, there is no PoS machine and travellers have to pay through cash.

"We have around 12,000 ticket counters. All of them would be equipped with one or more POS machines depending on the daily transactions. Managing cash is also a huge task for our staff. It would be beneficial for them as well if we could have enough swipe machines,” a senior rail board official told ET.

The railways ministry will also go cashless for paying vendors and contractors.

Railways already has 95% of its freight collection cashless.