IRCTC outlines plans to upgrade railway e-booking services

The Indian Railways Catering & Tourism Corp (IRCTC), which enjoys a virtual monopoly on railway catering and e-ticketing, has promised to upgrade its online ticketing services.

With its current connections on web servers it can book about 2,000 tickets per minute. The Indian Railways subsidiary hopes to increase this to 7,200 e-tickets per minute in the current financial.

In a detailed presentation of the site's upgrading before railway minister C P Joshi at a review meeting in New Delhi on Monday, IRCTC managing director R K Tandon outlined his action plan for capacity enhancement.

He said the exercise would cost the Railways about Rs100 crore.

Former railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal had announced in his Rail Budget 2013-14 that the booking capacity would be enhanced to 7,200 tickets per minute with the development of next generation software for the e-ticketing site.

There is usually a huge load on the web site at 10 am, when booking of Tatkal (overnight) tickets opens.

There is, of course, a public outcry over the number of berths being reserved for Tatkal passengers, who pay a large premium for quick booking. People booking early suffer as the IRCTC charts will show them waitlisted, even as the upper classes of the trains run half-empty.

''Reserving so many berths for tatkal is a self-defeating move in several ways. The railways lose revenue with berths going empty; and the whole rationale of subsidising passenger fares at the cost of goods is defeated,'' says a frequent railway passenger.