Buying tickets for travelling on Metro trains went a step backward on Friday morning, with Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL) staff issuing handwritten slips. Yet again at night, the online ticketing services failed to work for a while, causing a lot of inconvenience to commuters.

This was not the first instance. In the past 15 days, there have been instances where paper QR tickets could not be issued.

According to officials of the Chennai Metro Rail Limited (CMRL), on Friday morning, the issue was with the UPS. However, at night and on some other occasions over the past few days, glitches occurred due to problems with the network. 

“We have already identified the problem. We will ensure this does not happen again,” an official said.

While CMRL has a significant number of regular commuters who use the National Common Mobility Cards for their travel, nearly 20% of the CMRL travellers still opt to buy paper QR tickets at the stations. This section of commuters could be one-time travellers.

Sources said that issuing paper QR tickets in the past two weeks had become very difficult for the staff. “There were network outages during peak hours, as a result of which we had to give out handwritten slips that passed off as tickets. Though it occurred for a brief period, since it was rush hour, it caused the commuters much inconvenience. The downside of such manual tickets is we could lose the actual count of passengers and there may be potential revenue leakage as well,” a source said.

Vinoba Bhoopathy, a frequent commuter, said that because of the network issue, the Chennai International Airport station was packed on Friday night.

“There was a long queue. The staff said they were issuing manual tickets. Several air passengers and regular commuters suffered due to this issue.I waited for nearly 20 minutes, and only after the network issue was rectified did I get a QR ticket. In the past too, I have had problems getting the WhatsApp ticket, Also, one of the escalators was not functioning when I entered the station,” he added.

Commuters flagged this problem on social media too. One of the commuters, Gunasekar, posted: “Chennai Metro QR & site Downtime. None of the app nor Ticket counter functions. Only NCMC cards & Physical literally Handwritten tickets are being issued @cmrlofficial @CumtaOfficial please resolve soon and make announcements!”