IRCTC boasts single-day record in train e-ticket sales

The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), which enjoys a monopoly on railway catering and online train ticket booking, said today it sold more than 500,000 rail e-tickets on Friday, surpassing its earlier one-day sales record of 4.96 lakh e-tickets sold on 7 July last year.

This minor record was announced amid increasing criticism of IRCTC for its poisonous on-board catering as well as frequent crashes of its bookings and information web site, particularly at critical times like festive seasons.

The railway contractor, largely owned by the government, has recently invested Rs3.5 crore in enhancing the efficiency of the web site and another Rs3 crore in augmenting software licenses and storage area network. it said in a statement.

However, passengers are yet to see the results of this spending. The system is now being upgraded with more powerful Hexa Core servers (with 64GB RAM) from the earlier Dual Core servers (with 8GB RAM), which will cost close to Rs4 crore, IRCTC said.

"After the upgradation, we hope to achieve around 40-45 per cent increase in the booking during the tatkal hours," IRCTC said.

Tatkal is the Machiavellian scheme under which Indian Railways keeps aside a large portion of train berths for people seeking last-minute tickets. While the scheme boosts railways' revenue, it reduces the berths available for early bookers. It also increases the scope for corruption in last-minute bookings.

In his budget speech last week, railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal had announced that the IRCTC site would be upgraded to increase the booking rate to 7,200 tickets per minute from the present rate of around 2,000 tickets.

Railways observers have no doubt that the acid test for Bansal as railway minister will be whether he can improve the functioning of the IRCTC.