Railways to upgrade online ticket booking system

The Ministry of Railways is working on upgrading the online passenger ticket booking system of the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) to enable it to handle more demand.

The national transporter informed the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Railways that it has taken several steps from time to time to modernise the ticketing process.

"Next Generation e-Ticketing (NGeT) system has been upgraded constantly to handle an increased load of 15,000 tickets per minute in 2016-17, 18,000 tickets per minute in 2017-18 and 20,000 tickets per minute in 2018-19. Presently, IRCTC Website has a capacity of booking over 25,000 tickets per minute. A record number of 26,458 tickets were booked in a minute on 5 March 2020," the Railways said.

E-ticketing has reached up to 80.5 % share (till Dec-2021) of total reserved tickets on Indian Railways. The highest online ticket booking was 15,21,323 tickets, with 27,18,561 passengers on 12.11.2021. IRCTC has a user base of more than 10 crores registered users, out of which 7.60 crores are active users, the railways said.

This information was shared by the Railways with the Standing Committee on steps taken to improve the passenger reservation system.

While the Passenger Reservation System (PRS) in its current format is highly efficient, the volume of data and transactions required to be handled is huge and increasing multi-fold, the Railways said.

The Railways has instituted an expert study through IRCTC to strengthen the core application and backbone infrastructure for efficient and sustainable aspects to perform adequately by providing facilitation for new functionalities, interoperability among other railway modules and external applications with more maturity. The study includes the best practices of the ticketing systems around the world.

M/s Grant Thornton, an advisory firm, has been engaged by IRCTC to study the existing PRS system and provide recommendations to upgrade the system. Moreover, CRIS (Centre For Railway Information Systems) also seeks recommendations of M/s Gartner, which is a leading technology research and consulting company, from time to time for the refinement of the e-ticketing interface, the railways said.