Railway to Introduce Next Generation E-Ticketing System.

   The Minister of Railways Shri Pawan Kumar Bansal has that his Ministry will put in place a Next Generation e-ticketing system to bring about a paradigm shift in internet rail ticketing. Presenting the Railway Budget for 2013-14 in Parliament today he said, the new system will significantly improve the end user experience in respect of ease of use, response time as well as capacity. He said, the new system shall be able to support 7200 tickets per minute as against 2000 tickets per minute at present. It will support 1, 20,000 simultaneous users at any point in time against the present capacity of 40,000 users with capability to easily scale up as demand increases in future. The Minister said, the system will make use of advanced fraud control and security management tools thereby further improving fairness and transparency in disbursal of tickets.

   The Minister also announced several IT initiatives for the benefit of passengers. These are:

   i.    Extending availability of the facility of internet ticketing from 0030 hours to 2330 hours;

   ii.    Making e-ticketing possible through mobile phones;

   iii.    As a follow up to overwhelming response to Indian Railway website and Integrated Train Enquiry Service under “139”, a project of SMS Alerts to passengers providing updates on reservation status is being rolled out shortly;

   iv.    Covering larger number of trains under Real Time Information System (RTIS), whereby rail-users will be able to access information through nominated websites and mobile phones.

PIB

Online Reservation of Train Tickets.

   The change in the timings of Tatkal was made effective from 10.7.2012. The Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website recorded its highest booking of 4.95 lakh e-tickets in a single day on 13th July, 2012. The average internet ticket booking was around 3.74 lakh per day in the month of October 2012.

   In case of fully waitlisted tickets on which all the passengers are waitlisted, the names of all the passengers booked on that ticket are dropped from the reservation charts and refunds are credited to the respective bank accounts. Refunds of waitlisted e-tickets are processed by the system and the money is credited automatically into the account of the concerned. For expediting the processing of confirmed e-tickets, on which refunds are sought after chart preparation, the following measures have been taken:

Transaction Failures in E-Ticket Booking.

   During the period from April 2011 to March 2012, while 11.62 crore tickets were booked successfully through the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) website, in 96.12 lakh cases payment was settled but tickets were not booked.

   In May 2012 and June 2012, in 13.19 lakh and 11.41 lakh cases respectively payment were settled but tickets were not booked. The reasons for such incomplete transaction included non availability of lower berths, entry of wrong password, network failure etc.

   In addition to regular monitoring of the system, the following measures have been taken to improve the functioning of the IRCTC website:

E-Tickets through Mobile Phone.

   Indian Railways Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC), a public sector undertaking under the Ministry of Railways, has launched the scheme for booking Railway e-tickets through mobile phone through its website i.e. irctc.co.in/mobile. The broad features of the schemes are as follow:-

    Users can use their existing IRCTC user ID and password.

    After booking tickets through the mobile phones, users receive a reservation message with the ticket details.

    The service charges of IRCTC are similar to e-tickets i.e. Rs. 10/- per ticket for second/sleeper class and Rs. 20/- per ticket for all other classes.

   This information was given by the Minister of State for Railways Shri K. H. Muniyappa in written reply to a question in Lok Sabha today.

Source:PIB