Since Monday evening, unreserved tickets at five stations in Tamil Nadu including Chennai Central have journey details printed in Tamil, apart from Hindi and English.

The system has been introduced in Chennai Central and Egmore, Tiruchirapalli, Salem and Madurai stations. Apart from this, the tickets issued at Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam, Palakkad and Kozhikode will have journey details printed in Malayalam, Southern Railway sources said. One counter at each station has been earmarked wherein tickets will have the details in Tamil or Malayalam.

This is a trial measure introduced by Southern Railway to benefit lakhs of railway commuters who don’t know Hindi or English. Already, Indian Railways has introduced printing of ticket details in Kannada in Karnataka last year.

Railways introduced a change in their software to print tickets in other languages. “We are currently checking if this slows down the system. Based on the feedback from the trial, we shall extend this to all stations very soon,” railway sources said.

Around 93% of passengers travel on unreserved tickets. “Many passengers buy the ticket but cannot check if the details are correctly printed as they don’t know Hindi or English. I have been requested by many people at Tiruvallur station to check if the ticket is printed correctly. This will benefit them and also help them avoid paying fines to the Travelling Ticket Examiners,” said K Baskar, member of the Divisional Rail Users Consultative Committee (DRUCC) of Chennai division of Southern Railway.