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Four of the eight booking windows at Andheri station will be replaced by three ATVMs (Photo by Nilesh Wairkar)

Experiment kicks off on Jan 1 at Andheri, Borivali; commuters must operate the machines themselves.At both Andheri and Borivali, four of the eight ticket windows will be shut, and each station will get an additional three ATVMs. Presently, both stations have 26 ATVMs. The Western Railway has also decided to do away with the ATVM operators at Andheri and Borivali. These operators, or facilitators as railways terms them, are retired railway employees who had to be roped in as majority of commuters don’t know how to operate a smart card.This experiment is more of a desperate measure by the railways, which brought in the ATVMs to ease the burden on ticket windows. The Western Railway has 370 ATVMs in the Mumbai Division, while the Central Railway has 599. With many of these ATVMs defunct, commuters’ reluctance to switch to smart cards, and the ticket booking app repeatedly hit by snags, the serpentine queues in front of the booking windows are only growing. The Western Railway officials said yesterday that only 20 of their ATVMs were not functioning.Mukul Jain, divisional railway manager, Western Railway, admitted the plan is to “make it difficult” for commuters to buy a ticket from the booking window.“In an ideal scenario, the bulk of tickets should be purchased using the smart card and the mobile app. Andheri and Borivali have been chosen for the experiment considering they are two of the busiest stations on our suburban network,” Jain said.Andheri witnesses an average of 2.5 lakh commuters every day, and a sale of about 70,000 tickets, while around three lakh commuters use Borivali station daily, where about 60,000 tickets are purchased.Scores of commuters this newspaper spoke to, welcomed the idea of removing ATVM operators. Murugeshan Noppanar, who commuters from Dombivali to Currey Road daily, said it is time Mumbai matches steps with the developed cities. “We will continue to lag behind if we don’t embrace technology. My father-in-law was someone who always preferred to line up in front of the booking window. We convinced him to buy the smart card and taught him how to use it. He hasn’t gone back to the booking window since he started using the smart card about a year ago,” Noppanar said.Nihar Pandya, who travels from Mira Road to Kandivali, said he uses the mobile app to purchase local and long-distance train tickets. “I just hated standing in the queues. With smart card and the mobile app, I hope to see a day where there will be no queues to buy tickets,” Pandya said.Aarti Singh Parihar, senior divisional commercial manager of the Western Railway, said that it is the railways’ endeavour to ensure commuters are comfortable with the technology. “We are doing away with the ATVM operators at Andheri and Borivali so that commuters themselves will operate the smart cards. The more they use it, the more they will get comfortable with the technology,” she said.