A major grievance of the railway employees has been about obtaining the pass for travel. They have had to travel to a particular office, file an application and wait hoping to get the approval letter. It was only then they could go to a booking counter for purchasing tickets. The process was totally manual and there was no way of booking ticket online through the IRCTC on the pass.
Now, the Railway Board had eased the process by making the application and clearance online with Chairman Vinod Kumar Yadav launching the ‘E-pass module of Human Resource Management System (HRMS)’ developed by Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) few days ago.
While the system is be rolled out in all the divisions in a phased manner, the E-pass module will enable any railway employee to apply for the pass online from anywhere and generate it online, even through the help of a smart phone. Ticket booking too can be done online making use of the pass through the IRCTC site apart from booking from any other booking counter, informed senior railway officials.
This facility is to emable the railway employee get the pass hassle-free as different levels of officials will be working through the module without any physical checking of applications. It is part of the overall HRMS digitisation project of the complete Human Resource (HR) process of Indian Railways. As many as 21 modules have been planned in HRMS with basic data entry of around 97% employees completed in the employee master and E-Service record modules launched last year, they said.
Through the e-pass system, an employee and family details can be directly obtained from HRMS and the status of the pass application is conveyed through an SMS when it is approved. The break journey check is also done through the system and any pass official under an issuing authority can process it. The approval of an employee is taken for accessing the data in the portal.
An unique pass application number or the QR code in the pass with inbuilt photo of the employee is generated to trace the pass. “The employee only needs to enter the starting point, destination and break journey points along with the family or the accompanying attendant when applying,” they added.