Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
When railway minister Ashwini Vaishnaw recently declared, following complaints of CAPTCHA hurdles, OTP delays, payment failures and booking glitches from a student at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology (MNIT) Jaipur, that a new-look IRCTC website would be launched by July 15, it appeared to be an ideal case of responsive governance in the digital age.
A citizen (a student) pointed out an issue. The minister intervened. A solution was offered immediately. And the news went viral. Yet, the question that got far less focus over the years is that Indian Railways has been on the verge of offering the same solution, in one form or the other, for over a decade.
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That’s important because IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) has never been just another government website. It’s perhaps the most significant public-facing digital asset of the railways.
Some 90 per cent of reserved railway tickets are now booked online, according to a parliamentary reply tabled in December last year. For millions of passengers, the railway journey begins on the screen of a phone or computer, navigating the user experience that IRCTC dishes out. That experience of booking a ticket often shapes perceptions of Indian Railways long before a train reaches the platform.
Successive administrations have recognised this reality. The reservation system has undergone several rounds of upgrades, capacity expansion and redesign. The Next Generation e-Ticketing System was implemented to boost booking capacity. It was followed by the Rail Connect mobile application in 2017. In December 2020, the railways launched a new website and mobile app, which it claimed would be faster, easier to use and more customer-friendly.
In another reply to Parliament, the railways has stated that the remodelled platform allowed for search of trains, AI-based suggestions of stations, waitlist prediction, integrated services and improved transparency of refunds. The same response involved a dramatic increase in booking capacity, from around 2,000 tickets a minute before to over 25,000 tickets a minute after the Next Generation e-Ticketing System was implemented. The system peaked on March 5, 2020, with a record 26,458 tickets booked within a minute.
But that’s hardly the point. A website redesign can help reduce friction during the booking process, but it cannot generate capacity out of nothing. Indian Railways’ own planning documents acknowledge a deeper constraint. The National Rail Plan was launched to address capacity shortages and congestion across the network, noting that about over 40 per cent of the network was operating at more than 80 per cent capacity utilisation, while large parts of the High Density Network—carrying some of the country’s busiest passenger and freight traffic—were already heavily congested. Successive railway expansion programmes, including the Dedicated Freight Corridors and multi-tracking projects, have been driven by the same reality: demand on key routes has outpaced available capacity.
The challenge extends beyond tracks. Audits by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India have highlighted bottlenecks at stations, terminals, pit lines and stabling facilities, which can limit train-handling capacity even when coaches and locomotives are available. On many trunk routes, the problem is not merely of securing a ticket but that there are often more passengers seeking berths than the system can accommodate.
That helps explain why confirmed tickets remain difficult to obtain on many popular trains, particularly during Tatkal booking windows and peak travel periods. A better-designed website may make the race fairer. But it cannot eliminate the underlying shortage of berths even if the deck is window-dressed.
And the size of the deck is massive. Parliament has been told that over 490 million passengers had booked tickets through the IRCTC application in 2018-19. The figure rose to over 520 million in 2019-20. However, with growth and proliferation of facilities, passenger complaints did not completely fade away.
Most of the criticism has been about the CAPTCHA loops, re-verification, delayed OTPs, failed transactions and slowdowns at the website during Tatkal booking. Not one of these complaints is particularly new. These grievances have erupted over and over during the various stages of technology generations, re-design and software updates.
What users often overlook, or are even oblivious to, is that much of the brickbats the impugned website and the public sector undertaking running it gets are, in fact, the result of railways’ software firm, the Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), which handles the backend.
At present, railways is already in the final stages of a much-needed upgrade to its ticketing infrastructure, notwithstanding the recent viral moment. The idea of equality of access to railway reservations for commoners is not new, even with the advent of smartphones, mobile apps and AI interfaces.
The CAG, in its report No. 34 of 2010-11, has performed a thematic audit of the Tatkal and Advance Reservation System and made a stunning observation. During the audit, the Advance Reservation System has been determined to be “susceptible to manipulation”, and users could not access the facility easily.
The CAG noted Tatkal quotas being sold out in minutes as soon as the booking process started, irregular booking practices, bookings outside business hours, and collusion between agents and railway reservation staff, all of which negated the intent of the scheme.
Such has been the all-pervasive fear of unscrupulous elements hoarding tickets illegally, couple with periodic raps from the CAG, that rail policymakers mandated systems that are least aligned with user experience and the convenience of purchasing tickets.
The audit, for instance, termed reservation challenges as issues of access, fairness and system controls rather than merely a matter of technological limitations. Earlier, it used to be complaints about reservation counters and booking clerks. Today, it is CAPTCHAs, OTPs and payment gateways. Yet the central anxiety sounds remarkably similar. Passengers still worry about whether they can reach the finish line before somebody else does.
The government has been putting the issue of fairness/misuse before the capacity challenge an increasing number of times. While giving responses to Parliament this year, the railways referred to various measures, such as Aadhaar authentication of Tatkal tickets, OTP-based verification, anti-bot systems, user revalidation and limit on agents. In July 2025, the IRTC’s website and mobile application stopped selling Tatkal tickets except to users who registered with Aadhaar. Agents are still not allowed to book for the first 30 minutes of the booking window.
What many of these features bloat the experience for passengers, CAPTCHAs, OTP verification, Aadhaar verification and anti-bot measures are actually designed to prevent misuse. However, each of these layers added to make it more equitable brings friction to the real users. The consequence is a platform that can sometimes feel like it’s battling on two fronts: misuse and passenger frustration.
That tension is most apparent in the Tatkal ecosystem. It is frustrating if there is a delay on an e-commerce site. In the case of Tatkal booking, that delay may be the difference between travelling or not. An inventory that’s gone within minutes is a time of seconds. No longer is a slow-loading page, delayed OTP or failed payment a minor inconvenience. It is turned into a hindrance to access.
Railways says the system isn’t as bad as people think. In a written reply to a question in Parliament in December 2025, the government stated that IRCTC’s website has maintained an uptime of 99.86 per cent in 2024-25 and 99.98 per cent from April to October 2025. Another reply said that complaints only made up 0.0009 per cent of ticket bookings through Rail Connect and RailOne mobile apps between April 2025 and January 2026. The government said that over 90 per cent of refunds are begun the day.
Those numbers, using conventional technology metrics, indicate a supremely stable and resilient platform. But frustration still gets expressed through the small windows, which happen in very high pressure, where the demand is focused. The pain point is that it doesn’t behave as desired during the few minutes of the day when millions of users need it the most.
That another round of upgrades is already in progress is indicated by the government’s own stand. The infrastructure supporting the e-ticketing system is also being upgraded across servers, storage, software, networking and security to enhance its capacity and customers experience, says railways.
It’s more of a need than a nice-to-have feature for Indian Railways. The next overhaul will incorporate faster bookings, faster enquiry responses, seat-selection options, fare calendars and multilingual support. Those enhancements could create a better platform. They are also similar to the extensive improvements that were made during other redesigns and relaunches.
The importance of this is because IRCTC has a special role in the public digital infrastructure of India. It is the first port of call for many citizens for the railway system. It’s where digitisation’s potential and peak-hour demand collide. In the event of success with the new platform, passengers will be able to tell the difference almost immediately. The Tatkal booking process will be smoother. It will be less likely that transactions will fail. Fewer users will be faced with CAPTCHAs and available berths will be under grasp in real time.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
